


Wind & Anchor

by Arazsya



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Abduction, Animal Death (Imagined), Animal Death (Off-screen), Asexual Character in a Poly Relationship (sex not involved for asexual character), Canon Major Character Death, Canon-Typical Violence, Dreamsharing, Friends With Benefits To Lovers, Isolation, Jealousy, Multi, Nightmares, Resurrection, The Beholding, The End, The Lonely - Freeform, Threats, Visions, bereavement
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-10-23
Packaged: 2020-07-31 11:53:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 28
Words: 82,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20114668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: Tim Stoker dies to end the Unknowing - and then he wakes up. With the others' help and hindrance, he struggles to understand his resurrection, to find his place in or out of a changed Archives, and to navigate the relationships he left behind. He wants space, and time, but he doesn't have those luxuries - there are monsters in the Institute, and no kayaking holiday will be safe.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the RQ Big Bang 2019, with art from the lovely Mia! You can see more of her work on [twitter](https://twitter.com/BitterCombatant/), [tumblr](https://knock-kneed.tumblr.com/) and [AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mielebit)! Thank you so much, I have really enjoyed working with you! 
> 
> You can find the art in chapters 5, 7 and 10, or on [twitter](https://twitter.com/BitterCombatant/status/1160687630645809155) and [tumblr](https://knock-kneed.tumblr.com/post/186944194029/fic-illustrations-for-the-pilesofnonsenses-rusty), where you can and should also give her _all_ of the compliments!
> 
> Set at a vague future point (most recent episode as of editing was _Extended Surveillance_, though the fic was written before this point with slight adjustments for canon), after Martin has returned to the Archives and Jon has decided to try to not be a monster (and been succeeding thus far). Likely more optimistic than warranted by canon.

It’s not a bad way to die. It’s meaningful. Heroic, even. Saving the world. Avenging his brother. Making a statement about the suitability of waxworks as entertainment. A far cry from what Tim had imagined, when he’d first found out about it all. He’d assumed it would be some unlucky moment at work, caught up in the midst of something he didn’t understand, couldn’t see, and had never been warned about. That he’d be sliced out of the world so completely that nothing left in it would remember him.

This is better. The detonator is firm in his hand, a stable piece of plastic that will leave indents in his fingers if he squeezes it hard enough. One of the last few intact pieces of reality, as the House of Wax fractures and warps around him. His edges are starting to go again, what clarity Jon had given him wavering.

If he’s going to do it, he has to do it now.

Tim lifts his head, snarls at what’s before him, what’s behind. All done now – he’d got what he’d wanted out of the Institute, at last. He sees what the monsters have been building, why they took his brother. The answers he had been looking for, and more than that. He has the power to undo it.

He does. Utters a last line that he doubts anyone here will live to remember, and does. He feels, for an instant, everything, and then it’s all gone. He had expected nothing less.

When Tim wakes, the light is different. That last second in the House of Wax had been bright, incandescent. A flare, raw on his brain, no matter if he’d had his eyes wide or shut, and he had had them open. This is scarcely on the visible side of dingy, the bulb long out of fashion – he can hear it humming, a fluorescent muttering from above.

He stares out into the great blur for a while and wonders why it doesn’t hurt. Why he’s not hearing the insistent beeping of monitors, or footfalls through the hospital corridors beyond his bed. Why there’s no one else here – he’s not going to assume that there would be visitors, doubts that he’s high up enough on anyone’s priorities list for that, but there are people whose job it is to know when he wakes up, and they should be here, running their tests.

Instead, the quiet stretches out, and he eventually remembers that he can make his eyes work better by blinking, so he does. Everything sharpens, and with it comes the understanding that this isn’t a hospital. Not unless the NHS has changed its mind recently about interior decoration. It’s not clean – there’s a spider web around the bulb on the ceiling, gently waving from side to side, though not from the stirring of his breath, he doesn’t think. It’s not white enough, the closest it gets a shade of eggshell around the light. It’s not busy, no intercom and no sound of movement from outside the room.

The only thing he’d been right about from his first impressions is that he’s on a bed. It’s not an entirely unfamiliar one, either, he notes, with half a sigh. He knows it, just as he knows the crammed shelves and stacked boxes that he’ll see around the rest of the place, if he looks. He’s in the safe room at the Institute. Climate controlled and theoretically secure, right up until it isn’t.

Not _out_ after all.

“Tim?”

It’s so soft, so quiet, that Tim almost thinks he’s imagining it. Trying not to intrude, or so worried about how he’ll respond that it almost can’t ask.

He turns his head, still without pain, and one of the blurs to his left resolves itself into Martin, sitting in a chair that isn’t usually there. He’s not quite as Tim remembers him, but Tim supposes that none of them are the same as they had been, so he’s willing to let it pass. There’s no reason why this Martin shouldn’t look more sleepless, more hollow around the eyes, than the stock Martin in Tim’s head does. Especially considering what his part in the plan for the Unknowing had been, letting Elias rifle through him like a magazine.

“Martin,” he says, taking his time over the word, considering it. There’s not even the slightest hint of an ache in his throat, no roughness in his voice from disuse. No need for ice chips or soothers. “What happened?”

“You stopped it,” Martin says, like he thinks the Unknowing is what Tim’s asking about – Tim supposes that’s not all that unreasonable, really, but he _knows_ he stopped it. He’d felt it, and then he shouldn’t have felt anything ever again.

“No,” he says. “Why am I here? Shouldn’t I be…” he gestures at the walls, through them, to where he knows the Archives are, and beyond them, out of reach, the rest of the world. “Somewhere else? At hospital, or something?”

“Oh,” Martin says. “There’s nothing for them to treat you for anymore. It was just waiting for you to wake up, and, well…” he trails off, his expression a familiar one of slight helplessness, of just being used to it as other people make decisions around him.

“That desperate for beds, are they?” Tim mutters.

Martin smiles – so broadly, so genuinely, that for a moment something hitches in Tim’s chest – he can’t remember how long it’s been since he saw Martin smile like that. He knows for a fact that the last time it definitely wasn’t at him.

“How long have I been out?” he asks, trying to swallow it. Martin’s expression freezes, slightly - wouldn’t look like that if it had only been a day or two. Tim’s missed something. He can see it in the edges of Martin’s face, in all the places where the smile doesn't reach.

“A while.” Martin shifts in his chair, has to take a second to unhook his sleeve from something. “But you’re here now.”

“I suppose I am,” Tim says. He can feel the grudging note settling into his tone, and he’s sure that Martin hears it, but he keeps that ridiculous smile. It must have been bad, for that not to turn him off, Tim decides – a few more interesting scars for the collection, then. And the Institute isn’t finished with him yet, so he doubts that they’ll be his last. It’ll probably keep at him until his skin’s in the same condition as his mind.

He opens his mouth to ask another question, tries to sit up, but as he does, there’s a pulse of exhaustion through him, strong enough to set his head thumping back down onto the pillow.

Martin catches it, because it’s obvious and there doesn’t seem to be a Jon here for him to be paying more attention to.

“You should go back to sleep,” he says. “You’ve had a lot of healing to do, and–”

“I’ve been asleep for ages,” Tim protests, but he can feel that he’s not going to be able to keep up any sort of argument long enough to win it. His skull feels so heavy he can barely shift it around to look at Martin.

“That doesn’t count,” Martin says, his fussing a little firmer than Tim remembers. “Technically, you’ve missed out on a load of sleep, so you should–”

“Fine.” Tim closes his eyes, shifts his shoulders in an attempt to get more comfortable that he doesn’t really need – he’s sure he could sleep on the floor, right now. Martin doesn’t move, and Tim wonders idly how long he’s been there, how long he’ll stay. “Going to watch over me, are you? Make sure the spookies don’t come calling.”

There’s a long pause before Martin speaks again – when he does, Tim’s on the edge of consciousness, but he can still hear that smile in Martin’s voice, the warmth of it enough to lull him off.

“It’s really good to have you back, Tim.”

* * *

The dream is not a surprise. For all that Tim knows, he’s been having the same one the whole time he’s been unconscious, and just doesn’t remember it. After all, Danny had been on his mind a lot in the months before he had gone to the House of Wax, always there and never so out of reach as Sasha. In the moment he’d pushed the button on the detonator, Danny had been the backbone of his every thought. Of course it lingers.

He would have preferred something different. He has a whole childhood full of happy memories of his brother that he’d rather see surface in his subconscious. Climbing trees together, trying to elbow each other out of the race in whatever video game it was they had played, swapping ice creams on the beach because it turned out Danny liked mint choc chip much better than vanilla. But those good times weren’t what he’d been remembering, in the last seconds before the explosion.

That’s why he’s here, sitting in the replica of the Theatre Royal under Covent Garden, the rough-hewn seat cool against his back. It’s coarse, even through his shirt – the fabric will probably tear if he moves the wrong way, but he won’t. He hadn’t before.

It’s completely dark, but Tim doesn’t need the lights to come up to know what it looks like. He’s replayed it enough in his head, both intentionally and in dreams, that he could have drawn it exactly with his eyes shut, if he’d had the skill with a pencil. The rows and rows of other watchers, all of them stone and unmoving, not caring what happens down on the stage, where the thing that isn’t Danny stands in his skin.

He waits for it with that familiar dread sitting like curdled milk in his stomach. No choice but to suffer through it again. For now, he stays quiet, and that’s why he hears it – something new, something _different_, that hadn’t been here when he had followed Danny in.__

_ __ _

There’s breathing, in the dark next to him – soft and slow, as though its owner is asleep, a wasted visit to the theatre at the end of a long day at work.

_ __ _

Tim tries to turn his head, to squint into the darkness in an attempt to force resolution out of it, but his neck muscles won’t obey him. They keep his face pointing down towards the stage, and though he grits his teeth for trying, he can’t move them. It’s not that there’s some force keeping him in place, no sensation of web or strings. His body just won’t respond to any commands to look anywhere else.

_ __ _

All he has is his peripheral vision, and all that gives him is a shape, so deep in shadow, like everything else, that it might as well be another of those still stone sentinels.

_ __ _

The spotlight flicks on, bright and violent white. It picks out the clown, on the stage – Grimaldi, the jewel in the crown of the Stranger’s circus, a contortion of limbs and colour, crawling across the stage like some kind of insect. The Tim who had been here had never met Jane Prentiss, felt something squirming through his flesh. He hadn’t flinched. Tim can’t help it, now.

_ __ _

His eyes almost hurt from staring at it, but he wouldn’t close them even if he could – he has to watch the other thing that’s been revealed. Danny, the thing that isn’t Danny and never was, slightly smaller than his brother, standing still and shrunken in the centre of the stage.

_ __ _

Tim opens his mouth and calls to him without intending to – he remembers how badly that had gone last time he’d done it, remembers the clown’s smile and how he had never wanted to see anything like it ever again, but no matter how he tries to fight against it, it comes out anyway.

_ __ _

The thing on the stage turns towards him and looks up. It hadn’t done that before, Tim remembers. Had just stood and stood until the clown had come to remove Danny’s skin and any doubt that had been clinging to Tim’s mind as to what his fate had been. Now, it calls back to him, with Danny’s voice – just his name. Nothing more. It doesn’t plead for help or mercy or assure him that he loves him. It doesn’t even sound desperate.

_ __ _

It’s just an acknowledgement. A statement, that the monsters have heard him, and that there is no going back to his life before. That he’s going to be chasing this thing for the rest of his life.

_ __ _

He’s been _seen_.

_ __ _

The thing spreads its arms, and takes a step forward to bow, just as any performer would. Danny’s skin moves wrong on it, never quite the right size. Tim tries not to look, doesn’t need any new imagined horrors added to a scene that was bad enough as it had happened. He still doesn’t have the choice. At least that part is consistent.

_ __ _

The clown moves closer, its hands slapping together – Tim can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a parody of clapping or something more akin to rubbing them together like a pantomime villain, the approximation of any human action so far off as to be unrecognisable, but the thick leather-crack sound of it echoes all across the theatre.

_ __ _

“Shall I?” it asks, and he feels the flash of its smile in the dark, in the instant before it rips the skin away.

_ __ _

The creature that remains, made of static and colours and an ache in his chest, starts to move. It slides across his vision in a dance that just doesn’t seem to end – it extends far past the last moment of it that he remembers, repeating like an amateur’s extended music cut, just keeps turning through its circles. He watches all of it, his jaw clenched and his hands cooling where they grip the stone of his seat.

_ __ _

His eyes stop focussing before the end of it, blurred by too many passes of the creature on the stage, and he remembers the presence beside him, the slow rhythm of the breathing almost drowned out by the imagined music of the dance. He can pick it out, when he listens for it, slightly different now – still soft, but with the occasional hitch. Not excitement, so he takes that as evidence of it not being a monster. That, and that there had never been any other monsters here. Even in his nightmares after Prentiss, after the corridors, the ones down on the stage had always been enough for him.

_ __ _

A little more used to the gloom now, he tries to pick out what he can from the shape, still unable to properly look. It’s not easy, but he manages to wrest out a couple of details – a hand, resting in a lap, the fingers pressed so tightly into a fist that the knuckles are blanched. Beyond it, the faint pattern of a woollen jumper, that he thinks might be a dull bluey-green, but given the light conditions, could probably have been anything.

_ __ _

Not much, but more than enough for Tim to identify Martin Blackwood.

_ __ _


	2. Chapter 2

Martin is still there when he wakes up. He’s awkwardly folded into one of the office chairs, fast asleep. Tim would have questioned how he’s managing it – there’s nothing at all about that position that looks even remotely comfortable – but the Archives do like to bring enough bad dreams that its prisoners are exhausted enough to sleep anywhere. _Top of piano, window-ledge, horrifying corridor hell-maze, off the edge_.

That probably explains it, though – he’d been around, and Tim had known he was around, so his subconscious had just added him in, the finishing touch to an already derivative nightmare.

Martin doesn’t look as peaceful as he might have, once – his face is slightly drawn, a frown digging into the skin of his forehead. For a moment, Tim wants to smooth it away, but he doubts that his touch will be enough. He has a similar expression that he hasn’t been able to get rid of, after all.

It’s easier to study the chair. There hasn’t always been one in the safe room – there’s not a lot of space, what little there is cramped with boxes and shelves – he thinks that this one’s probably been moved from the Archives, and recently, from the lack of marks on the floor around it where the legs have been scraped against the floorboards. There aren’t really any clues there as to how long he’s been out of the hospital.

Nothing to explain why Martin’s there, either, still watching over him instead of going and fussing around Jon like he usually does.

Maybe, he thinks, the idea settling in his gut, cold and heavy as a glacier, Jon hadn’t made it out. Maybe he’s all Martin has left, and is going to be the sole target of his need to help from this point forward. _Great_.

“Martin?” he says, trying with his voice at its usual volume, not too loud. Maybe there’s a part of him that doesn’t want to wake him, he supposes, but it’s pushed out by the side that doesn’t want to lie there with that frigid uncertainty a moment longer.

Martin starts upright the second that the word leaves his mouth, eyes wide, recoiling like Tim had shouted. He’s relaxed again an instant later, favouring Tim with another of those too-bright smiles, so completely different that Tim’s almost sure he imagined the fear.

“Tim,” he says. “Do you need anything?” He probably means tea. Martin usually does, isn’t the most accomplished at bringing anything else, whether it’s support against their stalker and psychopath bosses, or a coffee order with more than four words in it.

“The others,” Tim says. He pushes himself up into a proper sitting position, all the better to see that there’s still no one else in the room. Just him and Martin. No one else assigning themselves to the vigil or coming to see him now that he’s awake. Martin would have told them, if there were people left to tell, but Tim can’t even make out the shape of his phone in his pocket. “What happened, did they…?”

“They all made it out,” Martin assures him, voice firm, like it’s something he’s been insisting to himself for months. “It looked… quite bad, for a while. Jon was in… a coma? And Daisy… something similar. Basira managed to get out before it got too bad in there, but the rest of you… it was bad.”

“You and Melanie?” Tim asks. He doesn’t remember having much interest in their half of the plan, if any – it was something against Elias, and he’d had vaguely positive feelings about that. But it hadn’t mattered as much as destroying the circus – nothing had, from the second that he’d learned about them, but now it’s gone and everything else is still here.

“It worked,” Martin says. He swallows a sigh, but Tim can see it in his face anyway. “Elias is in prison now.”

“Hm,” Tim says. Not what Elias had deserved, but he supposes it’s the safe option. Martin had always liked those. “So we’re all free to go, are we?”

Martin hesitates, one of his shoulders giving a reluctant shrug. Not a good sign, then, Tim assumes. He’d expected some sensation of disappointment, but there’s nothing. Maybe he would have needed an expectation for that.

“The new head of the Institute is–” He gives an abrupt shake of his head, straightening in his chair again. “It’s not important at the moment, you’ve only just got back – can I get you anything?”

“How long has it been?” Tim demands, sharpening in response to Martin’s avoidance. Martin feels it, starts to get that deer-in-headlights look that he’d taken on whenever Tim had got vehement insisting that something had to be done about Jon.

“A while,” he says, the words so dragged out that they might as well have been in different sentences. “I’d have to check to tell you exactly. A lot’s happened, Tim. I’ll tell you everything, I really will, but for now I don’t know where to start, and I don’t want to…” He gives a vague gesture in Tim’s general direction, that has Tim raising his eyebrows. “It’s a lot to take in, and you’ve been gone so long.”

“Right,” Tim says. He could press the issue if he wanted, he thinks, and probably wrangle some sort of answer out, if he’s willing to fight for it. But Martin must see him calculating it, and he sets his jaw, a new stubbornness about him that Tim doesn’t quite remember from before. And he’s still so tired, despite the sleep. He isn’t sure he _could_ win. “Where is everyone, then?”

“Jon’s travelling, at the moment,” Martin says, starting to slump again, clearly much happier with this subject. “With Basira – they’re supposed to be back soon, actually. They’re in Egypt, but I don’t think they’re having much luck finding whatever they’re looking for, and with travel times what they are for them now…” He trails off, and just smiles at Tim again. “He’s going to be so glad to see you back.”

“Is he?” Tim narrows his eyes, but Martin breezes right on past it.

“Daisy and Melanie are around,” he goes on. “But they’re… a bit different, now. Daisy especially. You’ll probably see them sooner or later, but they like to keep an eye on things, so maybe not until you’re up and about. If you like, I can have a word with them, see if they’d come by sooner.”

“No,” Tim says, pushing it in before Martin can get any ideas. “It’s fine.” He doesn’t know them. Not well. Daisy would have threatened him, if there had still been enough of him left that had cared, and while he and Melanie had been feeling similar strains of anger towards the end, he still hadn’t known her, and hadn’t been making an effort to. He hadn’t wanted any more connections, inevitably snapped.

His head’s too heavy to try and make the effort now.

“Sure,” Martin says. “Is there anything you need in the meantime? I’ve still got most of your stuff, so I can bring you some of that if you like, but I’m afraid anything you had with you for the Unknowing… it didn’t survive. The Institute should be able to provide you with a new phone…”

Tim lets him ramble, even when his brain starts to pick at the things being said, sure that they aren’t quite right. He’s too tired to struggle with them now, but he doesn’t want to sleep again, either. He just lets his head rest back against the wall, still sitting, and lets it all wash over him. Stays that way until Martin finally runs out of steam, and starts watching him, his forehead starting to crease again.

It takes a long time for him to realise that Martin is waiting for him to say something.

“I could murder a tea, actually,” he says. From the way that Martin smiles, bright as sunlight and just as genuine, he wishes he’d asked for one ages ago.

“I can do that,” Martin says, pushing himself out of his chair, his jumper creased from how long he’s been sitting there. He fusses at it, trying to smooth out the material, and starts to turn towards the door. The sight of his back sends something in Tim’s throat spiking, an irrational desire for him to stay, and he swallows it hard.

“Thanks,” he says, instead, a little too low, but Martin doesn’t seem to notice. He just heads for the door, doesn’t stop until he’s touching the handle, and even then it’s just a glance back.

“I really will tell you everything,” he promises, means it so much that it’s almost enough to make Tim’s teeth ache. “Just…”

“Not now,” Tim finishes for him, and forces a smirk to take the bite out of it. “Now is for tea.”

Martin nods, looks back at him a moment longer, his smile crinkling his eyes, and he pulls the door open and is gone.

* * *

By the time that the door next opens, Tim has done what little he can to make himself at home. If Martin’s maintaining this hovering thing, then he expects he’ll have a flap if he gets back and finds Tim out of bed, so the extent of that has been settling his pillows and sheets how he likes them, and leaning over to pick a book up off the floor.

It’s not exactly riveting reading, something about farming during the Industrial Revolution, but it’s better than just lying there and letting the already familiar ceiling of the safe room make itself indelible against the backs of his eyelids.

He doesn’t look up at the sound of the door, just flips his page over, and makes a start on the next one, playing some absurd game with himself, trying to guess which chapter the kind of horror the Institute is concerned with will turn up in.

“Have you considered bringing the convalescent a thriller or something?” he asks. “This is in danger of putting me right back into a coma.”

There’s no reply – Martin’s still not worked out how to get the door shut again while holding two cups of tea, Tim assumes. After so many years of fetching drinks, he would have thought he’d have it all worked out, but he supposes perhaps trying to keep all the eldritch horrors at bay might have taken priority.

He doesn’t realise until he’s flicking over to the next page that there still hasn’t been any response. He glances up, and nearly lets the book slip from his hands. It isn’t Martin.

“Oh,” he says. “Basira. Hi. Sorry, I was expecting Martin.”

She doesn’t come any further into the room – just stands there in the doorway, the bag slung over her shoulder swinging slowly from side to side, the tail end of momentum, like she’d been walking fast. Her face is a mask, held so still that he almost doesn’t recognise her, her features so schooled that it’s impossible to even guess what’s going on behind them. Or to assume that there’s nothing there.

Tim folds the book closed, not bothering to remember the page number, and sets it down in his lap.

“Did Martin not tell you?” he asks. “That I’d woken up? He did say you and Jon were away, but, not to flatter myself, I’d have thought that was at least worth a text.”

“There’s not really any phone reception,” Basira says, her voice unnaturally smoothed. Probably just jet-lagged and not enjoying having to make the effort to keep herself upright, Tim guesses. “How we travel, at the moment. It might have got lost.”

“Nice of you to try and cover for him,” Tim says, with a one-shouldered shrug. “Sorry to startle you.” The apology sounds hollow, even to him, lip service to the concept of politeness. He’d stopped bothering with the effort, before he’d walked into the Unknowing. Hadn’t found it necessary when he’d been going to die anyway. Now, he doesn’t know where he stands.

“So, Martin knows?” Basira prompts, a little more inflection to it this time, some emotion that he can’t quite identify.

“He went for tea,” Tim says, nodding. “But he’s been gone a while. Not planning some sort of surprise cake, is he?”

“Not as far as I’m aware,” Basira says. She still hasn’t taken her bag off, her hand hovering over one of the pockets, fingers just brushing against the zipper.

“Hm,” Tim says. He glances off to one side for a moment, trying to judge how he’s supposed to be, now, and then looks back to Basira. “If you see him, let him know that I prefer coffee and walnut, alright? He phoned me once from Tesco in a panic about Sasha’s party. Don’t wish that on anyone. Especially as he’ll probably ask Jon, and I don’t want him to learn my favourite flavours with his spooky knowledge powers.”

“I will,” Basira says. She takes a backwards step, out into the corridor again, though she keeps her eyes on him. “I’d better go and tell Jon. So that he knows not to take any calls.”

“Thanks,” Tim says, but she’s already gone. He frowns after her for a minute after the door’s swung closed again behind her. He’s not sure if she always used to be so weird – their interactions, before the House of Wax, had been few, and he hadn’t been paying attention.

He supposes they’re probably all weird, and that they had probably only got more so during all the horrors he’d been taking a break from – it’s not like Martin was acting normally, either.

The book stays where he’d left it. He’s not interested in the subject, and until he knows it’s important, he’s not going to try and slog any further in, or check the references at the back in case there’s anything more accessible listed there.

Martin doesn’t leave him waiting much longer, so he doesn’t have to resort to having a rummage through the boxes in search of entertainment – he knocks, the impact of his knuckles intentionally softened, and when Tim calls him in, he steps through the door backwards, leaving his tray of tea unspilled – Tim recognises his old mug, a thick, heavy thing with a watercolour design. He hadn’t used it in a long time, even before the Unknowing.

“What?” Tim says. “No cake?”

Martin stops, abruptly, the surface of the tea in the mugs swaying with it. He blinks, quiet for a while.

“Do you want cake?” he asks, eventually, after so long that Tim is considering getting up and just taking his mug. He feels fine, after all. “I can get cake.”

Tim sighs, and holds out his hand for his drink.

“No,” he says. “It’s fine. Just give me the tea.”

Martin hands it to him, then pulls the book out of his lap and sets it down carefully on top of a box that’s doing double duty as a bedside table, like he thinks Tim might spill something on it. Probably best practice, considering what the library staff had said last time that they’d taken a damaged book back, but in this case, Tim isn’t sure that it wouldn’t be improved no end by being a coaster.

“You probably should eat something, though,” Martin muses, sliding the tray under his chair before he settles back into it.

“Always used to be biscuits in the Archives,” Tim reminds him. “You used to put them there, didn’t you?” They’d all been very Martin sort of biscuits, custard creams and chocolate rich teas, refilled like clockwork.

Martin glances down, studying his own mug of tea like it’s the most interesting thing in the room.

“I think those ones are past their use-by,” he says, which probably means that they’re growing some new exciting form of microbial life. “I’ll have to get some more. I could get you something from the canteen, if you want?”

“I’m not hungry,” Tim says, and he isn’t, for all that eating would have been something to do. It’s not like they’ve got much in the canteen that he would actively enjoy, and he doubts that Martin would agree to a field trip to a café.

“Okay,” Martin says. He relaxes a little, settling into his chair, and they sip their tea in silence for a few minutes. It’s not awkward or desperate or resentful, the flavours of quiet that Tim had grown most used to with Martin. Instead, Martin sits there, a small smile still playing about his face, and Tim tries to judge from the state of his worn, unravelling sleeves how dramatic things had been while he’d been gone.

“Basira and Jon are back, by the way,” he says, the memory of meeting Basira shuffling to the forefront of his mind again.

Martin freezes, mug halfway to his mouth and tilting dangerously.

“What?”

“Basira dropped by,” Tim explains. “Acting really weirdly – must have been some trip. But yeah, she said she was going to let Jon know I’d woken up.”

Martin’s standing again so fast that the tea slops over onto his hand – it must be hot, still, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

“I have to go,” he says, setting the drink down next to the farming book. “Tim – could you wait here?”

“Fine.” Tim taps at his mug, drumming his finger joints against the ceramic. “There are some corners of the room I’ve not studied yet.”

Martin hesitates, his eyes flickering towards the door a couple of times every second, and then he snatches the book back up and proffers it to him. Tim doesn’t take it, raises his eyebrows at the gesture, so Martin returns it to his lap, and starts to back towards the door.

“Read some more,” he suggests. “I really have to go. Be back as soon as I can.” He leaves, walking too quickly for comfort, hunching like he’s a runner trying to get his forehead across the finish line first.

Tim puts the book back on the box, and takes another sip of his tea. Maybe, he thinks, once Martin gets back, he can finally get an explanation for why everyone is acting so strangely.


	3. Chapter 3

Egypt had been a bust. Nothing unusual about that, lately – Jon supposes he shouldn’t have expected anything different. It’s not as if Basira’s wild goose chases ever actually lead anywhere useful, even now she’s stopped using Elias as her source. She at least always seems more annoyed about it than he does; he’d swear that he had actually heard her teeth grinding when she’d stepped into Helen’s door.

He still doesn’t like travelling like that – he can’t deny that the cuts in journey time and cost are convenient, but he can feel Helen watching him the whole time, all the comments she’d made about how he should just give in and join her in being a proper monster, echoing through his head like her damned static.

There’s a part of him that would have liked to have stayed a little longer anyway. Visited some of the sights, trailed around a museum. But there are too many people in those places. Too many stories that he could make them tell him, easy as breathing. And he can hardly think what the point is, when he can just pluck the knowledge of what it is to illegally climb the Great Pyramid at Giza from someone else’s head, feel the hot wind off the desert in their hair.

That, and he’s trying to save the world, even if he’s not entirely clear what from, at the moment. He doesn’t have time to be a tourist. It’s not _safe_ for him to be a tourist.

If anything, he should have asked if they could go via Alexandria, to see if there was anything left waiting under those streets – older knowledge that might help them, that Gertrude had tried to destroy, that he might now need to continue her work. But it had probably been for the best to get back to the Archives sooner, rather than later.

He’s left it a little too long, to record a statement. Subsisting on recording Gertrude’s old ones is difficult enough even without delays, but Basira’s trip to Cairo had been abrupt, and supposedly a fast, in-out visit, and he’d thought he’d be able to manage a couple of days.

Instead, he’d felt people passing in the city like they were lit Christmas trees, and the statement he’d chosen from the Archives is flat and lifeless in comparison.

Jon opens the file, and reaches for the recorder, only to find the button isn’t at the angle that he’s expecting – already recording. He stands, cautiously, and casts a glance around the room. There are none of Helen’s doors in the walls, no tell-tale flicker of motion from a spider or an insect, so he moves slowly towards the entrance of his office.

It bursts inwards before Jon can get there, nearly hitting him – he steps out of the way, and if Basira, pushing inside, notices how close she’d got to knocking him, she doesn’t show it.

“Jon, we need to talk,” she says, about as businesslike as it’s possible to be when her face has taken on a greyish sort of cast. “You… you’re probably going to want to sit down.”

Jon looks out beyond her, into the Archives. There’s still no movement there. Nothing approaching, no attack. He moves back to his desk, pulls the chair out far enough that he’ll be able to get up again quickly if that changes, and sits.

He opens his mouth to ask Basira what’s on her mind, then closes it again, and gestures for her to go ahead. Sometimes he can scarcely tell if he means to compel or not, and Basira always notices.

“There’s something in the safe room,” she says. Hesitates, like she’s picking her words. She’s usually far more forthright, and Jon can feel the frown starting to settle into his face.

“You think it’s dangerous?” he says, when she doesn’t elaborate.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Probably. It’s not… it didn’t threaten me or anything. But it isn’t right – I think Martin knows something about it, it was talking about him.”

“Martin?” Jon’s focus sharpens, and he shifts in his chair, wary. The others had tried to talk to him about Martin before, more than once since Martin had left his position with Peter Lukas and returned to the Archives. He hadn’t talked about it, and Jon had no interest in forcing him. But Basira’s suspicious and Melanie is all out of trust. Daisy says she understands.

This doesn’t sound like that. This sounds like he should be worried, and he doesn’t really need the provocation, not for Martin.

“It…” Basira pauses again, trying to work out how to say something. It would be so easy to just pluck it out of her. The impulse echoes through Jon’s head like a dripping tap, and he swallows, controls his breathing, and tightens the faucet. He has to be sure that he can be around people without just cracking their psyche open like an egg every time he wants to learn something. “It’s not him. It can’t be him. But it looks like him, and it sounds like him, so that’s probably Stranger, right?”

Jon waits. Hates it. It would barely take anything at all to just ask her. She wants to tell him, after all. He’d just be _helping_.

He doesn’t.

“Tim,” she says, eyes dropping away from him. “But I saw the coroner’s report on him. Asked to see the evidence myself. There was _nothing left of him_. And now he’s just sitting there in the safe room, cool as you like, talking nonsense about cake.”

There should be a rush of shock. Incredulity. Certainty that it’s some sort of joke, that everyone else is going to leap out, yelling _surprise!_, no matter that that would be so far below their taste. Instead, it feels like Basira’s words just bounce off him. It’s impossible, like she says. Whatever she saw, it wasn’t Tim. Probably another mimic, there to twist at them again. Take Tim away, just like Sasha.

He stands. Doesn’t rush – whatever this thing is, he’s going to go and _look_ at it. See what it actually is, not what it’s pretending to be. Find out what it wants with Martin and the rest of them, and get rid of it. Make it cry out like he had Breekon. 

“It didn’t seem threatening,” Basira is saying. “But that doesn’t mean anything – it didn’t even seem to know that Tim’s dead.”

Jon skirts around towards the door, only for it to swing inwards a second time – he moves out of the way almost before it does so, and is well-placed to dart through, past Martin, too fast for him to snap out an arm and block him inside. He’s breathing heavily, like he’s run the whole distance from the safe room, and he has to lean against the door frame as he turns in an attempt to follow.

“Jon,” he manages, between gasps.

Jon doesn’t stop. Doesn’t linger. He doesn’t with Martin. Not anymore.

“Jon!” Martin hurries after him, keeps making little abortive reaches for his arm in an attempt to pull him back, but he can never quite connect. “Jon, stop, just let me explain.”

“I think I’ll go and find my own explanation,” Jon says, curtly. He keeps facing forwards, tries to only be aware of Martin in his periphery.

“_Don’t_,” Martin snaps – he steps around, tries to plant himself in Jon’s path, but Jon shoulders past him. “Don’t go near him. He’s not ready. He doesn’t _know_, you could hurt him – please, Jon. Just stop. I’ll tell you what happened, and then we’ll all go and talk to Tim together, all right?”

It’s not all right. Jon doesn’t stop for him. Doesn’t even slow.

* * *

Tim runs out of options, after he finishes his tea. Martin doesn’t come back before the boredom starts up again, he can’t go through the table box without finding somewhere else to put Martin’s mug, and he can’t reach anything except that without getting up and out of bed.

He does consider it, but he finds himself reluctant, his thoughts shrinking away from the idea of Martin getting back and catching him. It’s not that he’s afraid of what Martin would say – being afraid of Martin is laughable as a concept; even in the midst of his most vehement lecture on spiders, he’d still been _Martin_ – but he supposes he hadn’t minded how it had been, before, and he wants that to stick around.

There’s nothing to do except pick the book up again. True to what he’d said to Basira, it’s sending him right back to sleep – his eyelids are starting to get heavy, and turning the page feels like a physical effort. He checks the front, not caring that he loses his place, but there’s no ex libris, just a label indicating that it belongs in the Institute’s library, and is overdue for return.

Just mundane boredom, then. He supposes he doesn’t mind drifting off to that.

It’s almost dropping out of his hands, when the shouting cuts through his peace like the swing of an axe. He startles upright, bringing the book up as an improvised shield, but the noise is still out in the corridor.

There’s a thump against the door, and it swings slightly inwards – Martin must not have closed it properly – and Martin’s voice comes clear through the gap, calling Jon’s name, loud and loaded.

Tim doesn’t pick anything else out from that sentence. He’s too busy trying to count the number of times that he’s heard Martin raise his voice to _Jon_. Runs out of instances before he does the fingers on one hand. And none of them had sounded quite like this.

There’s nothing from Jon’s end, though Tim listens for it. Martin just keeps going, insisting that Jon stops, listens to him, right up until there’s another thud, and the door is shoved wide.

Jon stands in the gap, expression tight and as Arctic-cold as Tim has ever seen it. Martin’s behind him, stricken, reaching out like he had been trying to take hold of Jon’s arm, and been pushed back into the wall for his trouble. He steps into the room, moving like a cat after prey, an unblinking stare focussed entirely on Tim. He has more scars than Tim remembers, the feral edge new, unpleasant.

“Jon,” Tim says, his own voice sharpening. “Your get well card must have got lost in the post.”

“What are you?” Jon demands, all low menace and hatred so obvious he might as well be spitting.

“I’m Tim Stoker,” Tim says. Doesn’t mean to – he would have chosen something snide or resentful, driven home that Jon hadn’t been there when he’d woken up, but his control over his own vocal chords deserts him. He feels the snarl starting to rise onto his face, but even that won’t let him bite down on the words.

“No, you’re not,” Jon snaps. He moves further into the room, and it seems like that breaks whatever spell Martin had been under – he hurries after, trying to catch at Jon’s elbow, but Jon moves out of his reach without looking.

“More than you’re still Jonathan Sims, apparently,” Tim growls. He sets the book down, unnaturally controlled, before he can throw it.

“Jon.” Martin is almost whispering now, shoots a fleeting glance at Tim like he’s hoping he won’t overhear. He starts trying to move around, between them, but even with him blocking it, Tim can still feel Jon’s stare on him. “Jon, _please_.”

“Tim Stoker died in the House of Wax.” Jon’s tone is almost flat for a moment, before it starts to simmer again. “So, tell me _what you are_.”

“Tim Stoker,” Tim repeats. He shoves the sheet back, starts to swing his legs around, any chance of getting back to that quiet time with Martin shredded. “_I_’m still a person.”

“Both of you, please.” Martin’s gaze darts between them, no longer sure which of them he needs to be placating. “I can explain, just don’t–”

Jon’s head swings towards Martin, and the look on his face is almost enough to make Tim shudder. There’s not even a trace of anything he would have called human left there.

“What did you do?” It’s barely even words anymore, and Tim feels a bright flare of hatred, wants, _needs_ to give it voice, but Martin is already speaking – he doesn’t even seem to try resisting.

“I found a Leitner,” he says, the compelled explanation flowing out of him more smoothly than Tim has ever heard him talk. “While I was looking through the Artefact Storage manifests for Peter. It brings people back from the dead, and I used it for Tim.”

“You did what?” Tim feels it like a blow, glares at Martin like Jon doesn’t exist anymore. “Who’s Peter? Peter _Lukas_? What the fuck is going on?”

“You _died_!” Martin rounds on him, but there’s no violence in it, not even that particular Martin brand of passive-aggression – he’s raw, eyes wet with tears. “You died, and I needed you back.”

“You didn’t have the right,” Tim says, and it’s pulled through with rage like a spider’s funnelling web. There’s more in his chest he has to get out, has to make it _hurt_, but Jon speaks over him, his anger so doused there’s nothing left but embers.

“A Leitner,” he says, almost despairing. “Martin, you know the risks, why would you – I assume you properly researched it? Please tell me you thought for even a moment about what it could have done to you.”

“It brought Tim back.” Martin tries to gesture in his direction, but it’s a lot closer to one of the boxes. “That’s what it did – that’s all it did. Jon, please, just–”

“You really think that’s Tim?” There’s sadness there, now, an aching grief that might almost have got through to Tim, once.

Martin doesn’t reply, and in the quiet, Jon turns back towards Tim, impossibly weary.

“Do you mean any harm to me or my employees?” he presses – Tim can feel the compulsion this time, pulling the required responses from his throat like iron filings to a magnet.

“No,” he says. He hates everything, in that second – that that’s come out, that it’s the truth, the entire situation. He wants to mean Jon harm. He wants to burn the whole fucking building to ash, ruin it like he did the Unknowing, and end whatever still walks out.

Jon nods, slightly, and walks away. He ignores Martin when he tries to call after him, doesn’t look back when he follows, and Martin doesn’t try to go beyond the room. He stops on the threshold, and then turns back to Tim, eyes stuck on the floorboards at his feet. He stares there for a while, and Tim waits, feels that fury in every mechanism of his body, and welcomes it.

“Tim,” Martin says, finally managing to lever his gaze up to meet Tim’s – he’s desperate, Tim realises. Must still hate conflict that much, preferring to creep around at the edges like the spiders he’s so fond of. “I’m sorry. I was going to tell you. I just thought it would be too much, and–”

“You didn’t have any right to decide that.” Tim feels every syllable of it with his teeth, and from the way that Martin flinches, he’s sure he does too. “Not how much I got to know when, and not doing it in the first place – Christ, Martin, do you have _any idea_ what destroying the Unknowing was for me? It was the first thing that I had properly chosen in _years_ – the thing I _always_ meant to do. What happened was my choice. And you just took that away.”

“I’m sorry,” Martin says, barely on the right side of audible, but Tim still doesn’t know if he actually means it, or if he’s just going to keep repeating it until it makes everything better. “But Tim – you still did that. And I – we needed you. After you were gone, nothing was right anymore, Jon–”

“Oh, of course, _Jon_,” Tim growls. “Because he’s all you care about, isn’t he? Fuck me and what I might have wanted, but because Jon’s a bit sad you decide to go and magic me back from the dead. Just like a dog playing fetch, aren’t you?”

“Tim…” Martin is actually crying now, his lips moving like he wants to form words, but no sound comes out. Tim takes a step closer, makes sure that what he says is sharp and sudden as a slap to the face.

“Get out.”


	4. Chapter 4

Tim stops trying to sleep, after that. His mind is seething, a monkey’s paw release from his boredom, and it’s going to be a long time before it calms enough for him to even consider resting. He stalks in cramped, jerking circuits round the safe room, looks daggers at the door every time he passes it. Can’t go out – dead men can’t go wandering through the Institute’s corridors.

He wonders, viciously, if that’s why Martin had wanted him to stay put. Not out of any concern for _his_ wellbeing, but because if anyone sees him, they’ll probably get upset.

_Martin_. Tim has a good mind to head out anyway, to make _sure_ that he meets someone. It’s not as if he cares whether it’s a good idea, after all. They’re going to have to find out sooner or later, and they’re hardly going to call the police on him – or, at least, the police likely won’t come. Not here.

He doesn’t. Instead, he sits back down on the bed, and yanks his shirt off, so violently that something in the fabric complains. He runs his hands over his chest, his arms, checking for any new marks, any evidence that he’s been where he knows he has. Nothing. Whatever Martin, the Leitner, had done, it had put him back together, good as new.

Almost – his fingers catch on a worm scar, and he recoils. Pulls his shirt back on, wraps himself in anger to burn away the momentary sensation of burrowing. It had only fixed that last moment in the House of Wax. The one thing he’d chosen, the most himself he’d felt in months, and there’s not a scratch on him to remember it by.

Tim picks up the book, and hurls it as hard as he can at the nearest wall – it impacts with a dull thud, then lands, pages splayed, on one of the shelves. The paint is chipped where it strikes, but there’s no dent. Whatever they had done to plaster the place over after Prentiss’ attack, it’s more sturdy than what had been there before. There’ll be no escaping into the tunnels from here. Not anymore.

Pity. He could have gone out. In the streets of London, no one would have recognised him, noticed a ghost walking among them. He could enjoy the anonymity, find a pub somewhere, get drunk and listen to the noise. Except he hasn’t got the money. It’s such a mundane barrier that he wants to laugh. Can’t manage it.

No one comes to disturb him, but he goes to the door anyway, pushes it properly closed, and locks it. He doesn’t want to see anyone else, isn’t ready to be gawked or glared at.

Tim tries to go to bed, when the clock says it’s time to, even though he feels about as tired as he would after eleven cups of coffee – it’s almost like jet lag, though to his mind, hell and the Institute must be in fairly close time zones.

He tries sleeping on one side, then on the other, then on his back, but none of it is comfortable. The latter feels far too close to what he should have been, only the folded hands and serene expression away from his own funeral. He rolls over again and again, glares towards the door, at the light spilling out from around it, hates.

Of course the others won’t be keeping normal hours. Jon probably doesn’t need sleep. Not anymore. Monsters likely don’t need rest or biscuits or tea. Maybe that’s what’s turned him off Martin.

It feels like there is no real transition between lying there, head still simmering, and the click of the Theatre Royal’s spotlight. He’s back there, sitting in that rough seat, and the air in his chest turns heavy with it.

The clown is on the stage again, crawling around, calling up to Tim. Before it, Danny. The thing that isn’t Danny, though perhaps it doesn’t look quite so wrong this time. Very nearly almost him. Maybe if he just watches a little longer, it will be, and then Tim will have another chance to save him. Perhaps this one he won’t waste.

It isn’t. The skin is wrenched off again, and the thing begins its dance. Tim tries to turn his head away, but it still won’t move. He can’t look anywhere else, tied to the remains of his brother on the stage. But when he tries, he sees that shift in his peripheral vision again.

Martin, sitting next to him, like before. Those same sharp, pained breaths.

_Go away_, Tim thinks at him. _Get out. I don’t want you here. I don’t want me here_.

He can’t say it. Can’t even open his mouth in this place, unless it’s to call his brother’s name down towards the stage, just as the script demands he does. But his arms cross over his chest, defensive, angry, in taut tune with the shape of his thoughts. He can't recall where they had been, the first time, before he was dreaming, but he knows that the gesture isn’t from the nightmare, that it’s about Martin, not Danny.

Martin doesn’t leave, and neither does Tim. He wants to – wants to leave Martin to his horror flick, and have a peaceful night to himself. He doesn’t remember his last one, the idea of uninterrupted sleep lost somewhere between Prentiss and Jon and the corridors, walking back into that office to see Leitner’s beaten corpse. But there’s nothing he can do to make himself stand and walk out of there, pushing past the other seats, muttering faint apologies to all the solid no-eyed watchers in a parody of excusing himself from a real theatre’s show.

Instead he has to sit and he has to see. He can’t tell if Martin’s paying any attention to the stage, can’t make out his face, but he wants him to. He should look, should understand exactly what he’d taken away from Tim, even if this Martin is a figment of Tim’s subconscious, won’t live past him waking, leaving the real Martin untroubled.

He tries. To will himself gone, first, to take the control that feels it should come with the knowledge of the fact that the scene isn’t real, but there’s no change. Then he tries to make Martin gone instead, focussing his thoughts on every little twitch of motion from that chair and trying to erase it.

All that that achieves is making himself hyperaware of Martin’s presence, even his slightest shift like a flare through Tim’s consciousness.

Maybe that’s why he notices the next flicker, from the seat on his other side. He can’t really see anything there – his head is slightly inclined away from it, and he can’t do anything about that. But there had been a definite movement, like someone taking their hands from the arm rests into their lap.

Something drops away from his stomach so hard that it’s as if the whole theatre is falling, crumbling into the pit to make space for the new building to be constructed over them. Panic like vertigo crushes into his head, and if he could, he would spring from his seat and run until his lungs burn out.

Tim had been hearing Martin breathe for the whole dream, and for the one before. All the sounds that come from having a person sitting next to him, inhalation and exhalation and only the slightest of pauses when the scene on stage grew particularly harrowing.

There had been nothing from his other side.

* * *

There’s a new stack of books next to the bed, when he wakes up. _Martin_, he thinks, the name sour in his head, but when he leans down to pick one up and throw it after the other one, there’s nothing else with them. No well-meaning note or food or tea. And they’re not the sort that he thinks Martin would have left – they’re from the Institute’s library, heavy reference books that are only fictional in so far as some of the things discussed in them may not be sitting in the darker corners of their world.

They’re _research_, and Martin had been so insistent that he rest.

Maybe Martin is actually leaving him alone, Tim thinks, with an acid twinge in his stomach. The books could be from Basira – she’s the one, after all, who had heard him requesting better reading material. Had used the library a lot, he remembers, when Elias had first employed her. And, as a former police officer, she would probably have had a much better idea of how to get through the locked door than Martin would have, unless he’s got a long-term criminal career that he’s been holding back.

God, Basira. She had had no idea. Martin hadn’t told anyone, so she’d just walked in on a dead man lying there like Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, prattling about cake and books. No wonder she’d been acting oddly – she must have been freaked out, to put it mildly.

He wonders what, exactly, Martin’s plan had been. He doubts Jon would ever have had a better response than the one he’d seen. Maybe Martin hadn’t been planning on telling them at all, he might just have smuggled Tim home out of the safe room before anyone else saw him.

That wouldn’t have worked long-term, though. It’s not like he can stay away from the Institute indefinitely, or he’d already be gone. On the plane to the other side of the world, somewhere nice and remote where his own fear is too inadequate for anything to bother coming out so far to hunt it. But Martin probably hadn’t been thinking about that – probably hadn’t been thinking at all.

There’s a knock at the door, and Tim stands, turns sharply towards it, dropping the book he’d been considering – something about astronomy in the mid-twentieth century, though what that’s supposed to have to do with anything, he doesn’t know – onto the bed behind him.

His family had had a dog, when he’d been younger – it had been Danny’s really, his best friend, and it would do anything that he’d say. Would always come back whenever he called it, faithful, eyes soft and tongue lolling. Except when it saw another terrier. Then it would go stiff-legged, ears forward, face hard. Far too still, staring out at what it hated. Danny would have to go and get it, clip the lead on and pull it away. Tim’s not sure what would have happened if he ever hadn’t, but he knows it would have gone badly.

He can feel that in his own body language now, and there’s no Danny anymore.

“What?” he calls, the syllable more jagged than it should be.

The door opens, fast and businesslike. Not Martin, who, still cowed from the argument, would have been tentative for every inch of it. Jon, standing for a moment on the threshold, watching him with eyes that seem to see down to Tim’s bones. It feels like he waits a full, scrutinising minute before stepping inside.

“I brought you a sandwich,” he says. Holds it out, slowly, walks over to put it carefully down on the far end of the bed, like he’s disarming himself. “Assuming that you need to eat.”

Tim glances over at it, the bright packaging that has more colour than anything else in the room, and then looks back to Jon.

“Not my favourite,” he says. There’s the slightest shift to Jon’s features, at that – it’s a test, then, in egg and watercress, that he remembers Sasha liking but no one else. He’d probably been vocal about it, teased her, but he doesn’t try to remember. Doesn’t want to picture himself, smiling with the thing that had replaced her.

He chooses not to dignify the comment about needing to eat with an answer, though there’s a part of him that wants to snarl through an offer to share.

“It’s all that was left,” Jon says. Still watches.

The silence that follows is so absolute that Tim can hear the ticking of Jon’s watch – it’s much too loud, steady clicks cutting off his thoughts, trying to crowd him out of his own head. Counting down the seconds, almost a little too fast, each one another bubble in the simmering of Tim’s resentment.

“Are you planning to watch me eat it?” he demands. “I thought you’d already used your freaky mind powers on me. I’m me.”

“Maybe you just think you’re him,” Jon says, and Tim knows that voice, remembers it from before Jon had destroyed the table, that curling, dark suspicion. “Or maybe you can lie to me. Leitners don’t give people back.”

“Martin seems convinced,” Tim retorts – he reaches for the sandwich, all the same, ready to eat it in some sort of angry, performative gesture, or maybe just so Jon will leave, or maybe he is actually rather hungry.

“I’m not particularly inclined to trust Martin’s judgement at the moment,” Jon says. He takes a step closer, and that wretched ticking just seems to get even louder. “And I’m not about to let you just wander about the Institute before we know what you are.”

Tim snorts, and starts to rip the packaging open, ignoring the helpful perforations in favour of doing as much damage to the card as possible.

“All concerned about that now, are you?” he snaps. “Not so much when that _thing_ was wandering about wearing Sasha like a second-hand coat.”

Jon doesn’t even flinch at that, and Tim wants to hit him for it, wants to split his knuckles on Jon’s face and see if they both still bleed.

“All this new concern about employee welfare.” He makes sure the vitriol is stark in his voice, laces through every sound, as poisonous as he wants it to be. “Wasn’t so important when Martin and I ended up in that monster’s corridors for weeks, was it? And then I find out you already fucking knew about that door thing and just didn’t bother to tell us.”

There’s the slightest of movements, now, Jon’s hands clenching at his sides. Not enough.

“How’s it working out for you now, then?” Tim presses, in search of that breaking point. “Martin’s clearly so happy with you around that he felt the need to get me back.” He takes a single, angry bite of the sandwich, pulls a face as the flavours seem to curdle on his tongue. “But I see that’s to be expected – you’ve not got any less monster, have you? Human emotions only when convenient. It’s no surprise he needs someone else.”

Jon’s expression hardens, ever so slightly. Tim waits for him to snap something back, let him escalate it to blows, but instead, he just seems to crumple in on himself, shoulders slumping, face falling like a dropped dish, ready to smash into a thousand tiny shards.

“You’re not him,” he says, quietly. “Tim died – I lost him. He’s not coming back – do you know what I would give, for that? To do all the things that I feel like I should have, to say… to say what I need to, to him. I expect you do. Why else would you be doing this? If you want me hurt – don’t bother. I’m already there.”

Tim hesitates, the path before him suddenly uncertain. It had felt so simple, one jibe and then another, and now he’s hit a pothole, wheels spinning out for a second before he can get control again.

“What would you say?” he finds himself asking, carefully neutral, for a moment. “If I was real?”

Jon’s gaze flickers over him, but that violent scrutiny is gone – he just seems tired, now, awake and lost for far too long.

“I’m sorry,” he says, scarcely above a murmur. “I’m sorry, for the way that I treated you before. I’m sorry for what happened to you, to Sasha and Martin – I never wanted it that way, but it was still my fault. I was scared and – I’m trying to be better. I’m trying to… I _am_ still me.”

“That,” Tim says, grabbing for one last flare of anger, the certainty he can snatch from it. “Is the problem.”

He turns his back, half because he doesn’t want to look at Jon anymore, and half because he thinks there’s watercress stuck between his teeth and it’s a distraction, especially when he knows that Jon will notice it.

Jon stays a minute longer, and Tim doesn’t look back at him, doesn’t search for his reflection in the clock’s shiny plastic casing. He leaves, eventually, and Tim does his best to forget what he’d said, slide it out like the watercress stem. It doesn’t matter to him whether or not Jon thinks he’s him. Jon’s not the person that Tim had met, sort of liked. Hasn’t been for a long time. He’s not obliged to feel anything to or at him other than what he’s earned, and that certainly hasn’t been anything even approaching forgiveness.

He goes back to his book, and tries to start reading. It’s difficult to concentrate, though – Jon must be hanging around, because Tim can still hear that damn ticking for hours afterwards.


	5. Chapter 5

The boredom comes back. Tim tries to keep himself occupied, starts to measure the time less in hours and more in how many apparently pointless chapters he’s read. The books he’s been brought don’t seem to have any unifying theme – it’s like someone had been picking them out by colour or some other metric equally as unhelpful. All non-fiction, all hardback, all heavy enough to use as an offensive weapon – maybe that’s why he’s been left them.

He finishes the astronomy one, eventually, but nothing in it strikes him as important – there are some marks on the pages where someone might have left a sticky note to mark it, but there are no indentations for him to shade over or helpful scribbles in the margins. The next one in the stack is something about anatomy. Further down, there’s one on marine biology, then what looks like a bound collection of shipping manifests. He hardly bothers to stifle his groan.

Research, he’s never minded. He’d been _good_ at it. He’d been good at publishing, too, is happy enough around books. Likes them, even. Could have made a career out of them, in another life. But the writing in these is so obscure that he would have sent them back to the author for readability edits, and there’s nothing he can really do to divert himself from the monotony of them. No differentiation to his day, no interspersion of emails or statement follow-up.

Just a great slab of books to look through, on subjects that don’t interest him, concerned only with information he has no use for. Someone else’s research tools, second hand and useless.

He considers leaving. Leaving the room, leaving the building, anything, but he can’t go out into the larger Institute without risking having to deal with screaming or crying, and there are too many people in the Archives that he doesn’t want to see.

By the time that there’s another knock at the door, he’s mentally calculating the distance between him and the entrance to the tunnels, trying to judge whether or not he’ll be able to make it there without meeting anyone. He’s not optimistic – it had been near-impossible to see no one in the Archives even when it had just been him, Martin, Jon and Sasha there, and none of them had been _trained_ to be suspicious.

He opens his mouth to tell whoever it is to piss off, but they open the door without waiting and walk in. It’s Martin, holding something solid and dark against his chest – it looks like another of those damn books.

“Get out,” Tim tells him, without hesitation, refusing to look up from the chapter he hadn’t really been reading. There’s a picture on the page of a dissected frog, and it twitches with the paper as he crooks a finger under it, ready to move on.

“Tim–”

“I said, get out,” Tim repeats, with no variation in tone.

“I won’t stay,” Martin says. He shifts, slightly, trying to hold the book up so Tim can see it, but either it’s too heavy or he’s nervous, his arms shaking as he does so. “I’ve just come to show you what I did – explain – and then I’ll go.”

Tim glances up at the book, and then to Martin, manages to keep it measured and remote.

“Is that it?” he asks. He doesn’t soften it. “The Leitner?”

Martin nods. He doesn’t come any further in, just stands, waits for Tim to give him permission. He’s not holding the thing like it’s an ancient tome of indescribable power. More like a family bible, clutched for moral support.

“Fine.” Tim gestures towards the end of the bed, because there’s no desk. He means for Martin to put it down, then say his piece and leave, but Martin sits instead, smooths a hand over the cover, such a deep burgundy that it’s almost black. He doesn’t smile, at least, doesn’t look like he thinks this is an improvement. Just worries at his lower lip with his teeth, still upset. If he hadn’t been, Tim would have had to snap at him some more.

Instead, he just shuffles around, takes a space that’s near enough to see the book properly, but still far enough away to leave a pointed distance between him and Martin.

“I read about it when I was looking through the Artefact Storage manifests for Peter, like I told Jon,” Martin says, more to the book than to Tim. “Yes, Peter Lukas – he became the Head of the Institute after Elias went to prison. Elias had it all sorted out beforehand. I was Peter’s assistant for a while.”

“Surprised you’d leave Jon,” Tim comments, letting his voice sharpen just enough. He’s not sure where he wants it to lead, if he actually wants it to lead anywhere, or just needs to keep picking at him.

Martin winces.

“Jon wasn’t really… around, at the time,” he says, slowly. “He didn’t – I mean, he was – it wasn’t good, after you stopped the Unknowing. Daisy was gone. Jon was gone. Then there was this… attack. From the Flesh. We could all have died, and I went to Peter for help. He said he’d keep Basira and Melanie safe if I just helped him out with a few things, and I said I’d think about it. I was still hoping Jon would come back, you know? Fix everything. But he didn’t.” He attempts a wan smile, and Tim doesn’t return it. “Turns out it was actually mostly spreadsheets.”

“Are you trying to tell me that a ship’s captain that _Elias_ appointed his successor doesn’t have any idea how to use Excel?” Tim keeps it cold, pulling holes for the sake of it.

Martin shrugs, his attention drifting back down towards the book.

“That’s what he said.”

“Right,” Tim says, with an impatient shake of his head. “So, you read about the book while doing shady spreadsheets for our fun new monster boss.”

“Yes,” Martin says. “There wasn’t much about it–”

“But you decided to use it anyway,” Tim concludes, the slightest spark of heat in the words. “On me.”

“Do you want me to explain what happened or not?”

Tim blinks, momentarily surprised by the force in Martin’s voice. He wonders what’s brought that on, then remembers that he doesn’t care, and gestures for him to continue.

“I was going to look up more,” Martin goes on. “There was supposed to be a statement that came in with it – 9991307 – but I couldn’t find it. It’s probably still lost in the filing cabinets somewhere. Not really been a lot of time to sort them, lately.”

“And you still thought it was a good idea to use this thing?” Tim prods. “Without _any_ information?”

“Not a _good_ idea,” Martin corrects, and there’s that hint of backbone again, just below the surface. “But it was the only one I–”

He’s interrupted by the door swinging open again – he silences himself immediately, seems to shut himself down almost completely, placing a protective hand over the book.

It’s Jon. No sandwiches with him this time, so whatever test he has in mind must be something different. He’s back to suspicion, any trace of the fractures that Tim had seen before thoroughly plastered over.

“Oh,” Martin says, shuffling the book onto the bed beside him, trying to lean so that he covers it. “Jon, we were, um, just–”

“It’s fine,” Tim sighs, too tired to have to sit here and watch Martin trying to lie. “You’ll only have to tell it all to him again, won’t you?”

Martin glances at him, considers him for a long moment, and then picks the book up again.

“It’s what I used,” he says to Jon, and then he holds it out towards Tim, still a faint tremor in his hand. “I don’t think it’s dangerous to handle.”

Tim takes it, and flips it open in his lap, not bothering to wait for Jon to get close enough to see. It’s not a book. Not really. The pages are thick and a dull matte black, don’t turn as easily as they should, refusing to bend. He notices the faded bookplate on the inside cover, and doesn’t bother looking over it – he knows what it will say.

The first photograph is black and white, an indistinct face staring out at Tim, features set in a serious, easily-maintained mask. He flips further in, and the people seem to grow happier, more modern. A few of the pages are badly marked, some slightly torn at the edges, some even scorched, but the photos are all as pristine as the day that they were taken, and the subjects keep smiling.

This is why Martin picked him, he realises, his chest tightening. They don’t have any photos left of Sasha.

The one he had chosen of Tim is nice. From a while ago – he’s smiling towards the camera with an expression that he’s forgotten how to make. Genuinely happy. They had only just been assigned to the Archives, then. It had been one of their rare team outings, and Sasha had insisted on taking pictures, _for posterity_, she’d said – he thinks she would have hated where it had ended up. He remembers the day, sunny and easy, the three of them queuing for chips at a food truck, Martin feeding the ducks, Jon lingering back and glowering at it all with some new attitude he seemed to have grown specifically for being Head Archivist.

He bites down on his tongue before he can ask why Martin had used that one. It’s not like he can’t guess. Martin had wanted back happier times, and a happier Tim.

He doesn’t say anything to either of them, though they’re starting to talk to each other, hushed, like they’re trying not to interrupt him. He folds back to the front of the album that had dragged him back to the Institute, and starts to leaf through it again.

* * *

* * *

Tim is snapped back to wakefulness by an impact, something hitting the bed. He startles, trying to scramble properly upright before he’s fully aware, just knows that he has to get up and away before he gets hurt. There’s a shape, standing not far from the bed, though he’d locked the door again after Jon and Martin had left. He tries to dart away, only to find that there’s a wall in the direction he needs.

“Easy,” they say, holding out a placating hand. “Sorry, didn't mean to scare you.”

It’s Daisy. The murder-cop. Her outline resolves, and he tries to soothe his heart rate back down.

“What do you want?” he demands, not about to be polite, even with her. He hadn’t been before. Won’t be now. She probably thinks he’s a monster too, and is there to put him down, stabbing and shooting her way through life without ever noticing the irony. Or perhaps she has and just doesn’t care.

“Martin asked you to bring me these,” she says, and gestures towards the bed. She doesn’t look away from him, but there’s nothing threatening in her face, just one raised eyebrow. “Getting some research done?”

He ignores her question – he’d been trying to read, but it had been easier to drift than concentrate on an outdated description of the process of respiration, and he’d already been tired. Seems to be whether he sleeps or not, and the books don’t help with any intentions of not dropping off.

On the bed is another sandwich, though this one has clearly been picked out by someone other than Jon, because he actually likes coronation chicken. Next to it is a phone, charging wire and plug coiled round it like a snake – Tim picks it up, and the screen springs to life at the touch of a button. It’s a nice model, from what he remembers, but given how long he’s been gone, it might be rather old-fashioned by now. But even then, he doubts it would be cheap.

“Martin requisitioned this?” he asks, flicking through the screens – nothing but the factory standard apps.

“As far as I can tell,” Daisy says, and he can just make out her shrug in his peripheral vision. “I understand he still does a lot of the admin.”

“Hm,” Tim says. “Didn’t figure Martin for the abuse of corporate power type.”

“It’s got his number in,” Daisy tells him, shifting slightly on her feet, almost uncertain. Not how he remembers her.

“I don’t think I’ll be needing that.” Tim brings up the contact list, finds the one helpfully labelled _Martin_ and deletes it. It lingers on the screen for a moment, as the system catches up with itself, and then vanishes. “What’s the other one?”

“That’s mine,” Daisy says, with an awkward, tentative attempt at a smile. “In case you need anything.”

Tim frowns from the phone to her and back again. She doesn’t quite look the same, either. None of them do, but the way she’s different isn’t quite the same as how the others are – she’s got more lines, yes, more marks from stress. Thinner. But less like she’s not been eating properly, and more an actual loss of muscle. Her face is less sharp than he ever remembers it being – not soft, just an absence of aggression. Like she’s not been using any angry expressions, lately.

“What happened to you?” he asks, setting the phone back down on the bed. “You’ve not even tried to stab me yet.”

“I…” she hesitates, and it seems like that goes deeper, a flash of something in her face. “I’m not with the Hunt, anymore. I was… cut off. Jon got me out. He really is trying–”

“So, any other numbers I should be getting?” Tim interrupts. Doesn’t want to hear that Jon’s doing better. He hadn’t when it had counted, and Tim’s too tired to give him yet another chance, a bone-deep weariness he can’t seem to shake. Maybe a side-effect of being stuck back together by a creepy book. “Melanie, Basira?”

“I asked around,” Daisy says, like it’s an admission she doesn’t want to give.

“Oh,” Tim says, concludes easily what she’s trying to avoid saying. It’s not really a surprise. “So, everyone who wants the potential monster to have their contact details is already in the phone.”

“I put the number up on the noticeboard in case they change their minds,” Daisy says. “If you want it taken down you’ll have to go and do it yourself.” She takes a hand from her pocket, holds something out towards him – another piece of paper, the way it’s curled at the edges distinguishing it as a post-it note. “And I’ve got Martin’s number for you again here.”

“I don’t need that.” Tim feels his face turn stony, and he shifts slightly, standing between Daisy and his mobile. “If I wanted it, it would still be in the phone–”

“I’m not saying you have to use it,” Daisy says. “Or that you want it. You don’t have to talk to him if you don’t want to. Just that it might be useful for you to have more than one contact.”

“I don’t need him,” Tim says, more firmly. He moves closer to Daisy, slowly at first, and then, when she doesn’t seem to have a knife, snatches the note from her, screwing it up into a ball and throwing it at the waste paper bin behind the door. His aim is impeccable.

“Fine,” Daisy says, apparently utterly unconcerned. “If you need food or anything–”

“I’ll go myself,” he snaps, holds up a hand to stop her from protesting. “I know, dead. I’m talking about taking the tunnels. Going and getting something somewhere else.”

“And how are you going to pay for that?”

“Fine,” Tim says, glowering. “I’ll text you. Have you added Florence Nightingale to your CV?”

“Not looking for a job,” Daisy says, tips her head towards the stack of books, apparently not happy discussing her personality change. “How are you finding those? I wasn’t sure what you liked, but they were on Basira’s reading list.”

“That was you?” Tim shakes his head, pushes aside the surprise, reminds himself that it doesn’t matter. “I wouldn’t mind some cliff notes. Not sure why they’re important.”

“Oh,” she says, taking a step closer and considering the ones he’s picked out. “That would be… body hopping darkness monster, very large sea monster, and… checking to make sure not all ribs are vital before we feed them to a bodybuilding monster.” She offers him a smile a little more like her old one, though with fewer teeth. “Mind if I join you?”

Tim sighs. He subsides back into his spot, spreads a hand.

“Be my guest,” he says. He shifts slightly, uncomfortable, and something scratches at his back. He frowns, rubs at the offending spot. It comes away with what feels like sand under his fingernails, and he grimaces. Maybe one of the statement givers had come from the beach, and they’ll just be bothered by grit in here for the rest of time.

Daisy is less of an intrusion. She just sits there, reads in a non-judgemental silence, that stretches and stretches, with her just sitting there, quietly turning the pages, until he can’t stand it any longer. It’s not like the book can be that interesting – it’s the shipping manifests.

“Aren’t you going to ask?” he demands.

“Ask what?” She doesn’t look up, unfolds a long sheet, glances along it.

“I don’t know,” he says, and he can hear that he’s failing to keep his voice level. “If I’m still me. If I’m a monster.” He looks towards the bedside table box, the album sitting on top of it, blending into the farming book, left with him at his request. It should look innocuous, but to his eyes it’s so obviously different it might as well have an aura. “That sort of thing.”

Daisy blinks, gives him a glance over the top of her book.

“Martin seems to think you’re you,” she says.

“And, what, good friends with him, are you?”

“No.” Daisy’s face twitches, the edge of an expression she’s not letting out. “Like he told me. But he knew you as you were better than I did.”

“And that’s enough for you?” Tim’s frown deepens. She certainly _has_ changed, then – the Daisy who’d first come hunting Jon would never have trusted something like that – maybe with Basira, but not anyone else, certainly not someone she’d threatened to frame.

“If you turn out not to be you,” Daisy says, glancing at her watch – he can hear it ticking, he realises, just at the edges of his consciousness – and folding her book closed. “Then we’ll deal with it then. But until then – I escaped. Why shouldn’t you?”

Tim opens his mouth, and then shuts it again. He can’t really argue with that – should just take his allies where he can get them, he supposes. There’s another tickle against his back, and he sighs. Doesn’t try rolling over again – he’ll probably just need to wash all the sheets. He just lies there, listening to Daisy’s watch, right up until she starts fiddling around with her own phone to put The Archers on.


	6. Chapter 6

The exhaustion doesn’t seem to pass. It sits, a dull ache in the back of Tim’s head, pulls a dry stinging across his eyes, turns him unsteady whenever he moves. He tries sleeping in and going to bed early, and while he has no trouble getting to sleep – the House of Wax is always waiting for him, a shadow he can’t shake – he never wakes feeling refreshed.

Maybe that’s why, when he opens the door to Martin’s knock and finds him standing there, eyes haunted and carrying a bag that smells of curry, he steps aside to let him in. Maybe he’s just hungry – he hasn’t had a full meal since before the House of Wax, though Daisy brings him plenty of sandwiches. She’s the only one he’s seen, really, and he has no objections to that. She usually just reads for a bit or does some exercises in the corner, and tends to go after The Archers finishes.

Martin is clearly planning to stay. He brings the bag inside, holding it with both hands like he’s worried he might drop it. He notices the album, still on the box by the bed, flinches, and then turns back to Tim, cheeks flushing, eyes too bright. Tim sees him open his mouth, and turns to shut the door behind him, so that he doesn’t have to see the rest of it.

“Tim,” he says, voice rough. “I’m sorry. Really. I didn’t think about what you wanted, and I should ha–”

“Look, Martin,” Tim interrupts. He stays as he is for a long moment, wanting to tip his forehead forward and just let it rest against the door for a while, fall asleep there. “I don’t forgive you. And I’m not going to.”

“… Sure,” Martin says, and Tim can hear the difference in it. It’s desolate enough that something in his chest scrunches.

“I don’t want you to apologise anymore,” he says, sounds almost as bad as Martin does. “It’s not going to work. But I’m too tired to stay angry at you. So… so let’s eat some curry and not talk about it, okay?”

He turns away from the door, doesn’t bother trying to force a smile, because Martin will be able to see that it’s not working properly anyway. The relief in Martin’s face is so acute, Tim’s words might well have been a summer rain in the midst of a drought.

“We can do that,” Martin says. He holds the bag out towards Tim, the plastic rustling in his grip. Tim points him down towards the floor, then goes to sit there himself, cross-legged, near to where he’d broken through during Prentiss’ attack. Martin looks towards the bed, then shakes his head and joins Tim, a respectful distance away.

He doesn’t ask, and Tim doesn’t tell. Not about the sand that somehow seems to have got everywhere, or the dreams he has every night, or the way that he’s learning every uncomfortable lump of that mattress.

Martin busies himself pulling some paper plates out of his bag. He slides one over to Tim, then starts to get the cartons out. Lets Tim serve himself first, then picks at what’s left, like he doesn’t actually like any of it – Tim does, though. They’re all dishes that he’d chosen and enjoyed before, on the rare occasion when they’d actually got a meal together.

It makes the tiredness seem just a little less wretched, to think that Martin had noticed, remembered, even back when he and Jon had still been on good terms. He doubts it will last.

They eat in silence, for a while, until Martin, chasing a clump of rice around his plate with a plastic fork, breaks it.

“Have you been okay?” he asks, quietly. One of the grains of rice separates from the mass, and he glances absently between the two like he’s not sure which one to keep poking at.

“Of course I haven’t,” Tim says, the words muffled through a mouthful of chicken. “You should probably be more specific.”

“Is there anything you need?” Martin tries, sounds almost as hollow as a self-service checkout machine. Still guilty, then. It hadn’t just been for Tim’s benefit.

“Not to be stuck in here,” Tim says.

“Oh.” Martin worries at the rice ball until it disintegrates completely, and then puts his fork down and reaches for his bag, digging through it. “Um. I wasn’t sure what you’d want to do? Your old place is…”

“Not mine anymore,” Tim concludes, and Martin nods, still rummaging, rather than looking at him.

“I saved what I could,” he says. Doesn’t see Tim’s frown, though he maintains it for a minute. He’d died a long time ago, for them. It sounded like the whole resurrection plan had been spur of the moment, so why had Martin needed to take on his things? “It’s mostly at my place.”

“Not like I’ve got anywhere to put it.” Tim gestures at the safe room, with barely enough open floor space for them to sit already. “And no income to pay rent.”

Martin finally retracts his arm from his bag, and holds something out towards Tim – it’s a credit card, still shiny and with bits of adhesive stuck to the back.

“What’s this?” Tim asks. He takes it, turns it over. It’s got his name on it, and the Institute’s, underneath, in glimmering block capitals.

“It’s paid for by the Institute,” Martin says. “Don’t go mad? I still do a lot of the, um, admin work? And I’m not sure how much Peter’s aware of what I’m doing. I’d rather he wasn’t. At all.”

“Yeah,” Tim says. “Fine. I’ll hold off on a trip to the jeweller.” He shoots Martin a glance, trying to gauge his mood. “Been up to anything else shady with the Institute’s accounts, Martin?”

“Mostly answering emails,” Martin says, shaking his head, back down at his rice again. “Peter doesn’t like dealing with office politics, so I’m trying to sort out any employee disputes before he can see them.”

“Ohhhh,” Tim says, shifting to face Martin more directly. “So you’ve got all the juicy gossip, have you?” It’s performative. He doesn’t care about bickering amongst the library staff or what horrors Rosie might have seen from the public. But, maybe if he pretends, it’ll be a bit more like it was again. He’s tired enough to want that, trying to reach back to a place where he’d almost been happy.

Martin doesn’t engage with his effort, just shrugs, mumbles something that seems to be more intended for the rice than him.

“Any news of the monster world, then?” Tim tries. “Stopped any more grand rituals?”

“I heard Jon and Basira went to Ny-Ålesund,” Martin says. “But I don’t think there was much there. They’ve just been looking for stuff. But I was still working for Peter, so I wasn’t involved.”

“Why did you come back?” He doesn’t mean it to be a probing question, expects that it’s not going to be that complicated. Martin had left when Jon wasn’t around, and he’d probably come back when Jon had. But Martin hesitates, seems to stop doing anything else for a moment.

“Peter and I had some disagreements,” he says, finally. “About some of his methods. So I came back here.”

Tim nods. He doesn’t think he’s going to get anything better from that line of questioning – Martin clearly doesn’t want to discuss it, and he can respect that, for now.

“Do you want any more of that?” he asks, instead, gesturing with his fork towards one of the cartons.

Martin pushes it towards him, and Tim makes short work of it. He hadn’t realised quite how hungry he was, but he supposes Daisy’s sandwiches can only have gone so far. She doesn’t seem keen on leaving the Institute, either – he wants to be somewhere else, but actually taking that step, even without the consideration of the Archives between him and his way out, feels harder than it should. He can’t seem to get it through his head that he can cross that distance whenever he feels like it.

Martin eventually gives up. He gathers the empty packets into the plastic bag again along with both plates, then stands.

“Get some sleep, then,” he says, and Tim thinks there should be some sort of remark there, but nothing comes to mind.

“Thanks,” he says, instead. Martin blinks, stares down at him in confusion, starts to open his mouth, so Tim gestures at the remnants of the meal, likely soon to be washed out and deposited in the Institute’s recycling.

“Oh,” Martin says, and the tension seems to go from his shoulders, just slightly. “Anytime.”

“Good,” Tim says, and waggles the credit card. “But tomorrow night, I’m picking the takeaway.”

Martin’s smile is genuine, this time, lights his face, and for a moment, Tim thinks that if he keeps trying, maybe his could be too.

* * *

Tim had thought that tidying would be a good idea. That exercising a measure of control over his environment might somehow make his sleep more restful, finally help him shift the numbing exhaustion that only seems to grow heavier when he’s still. Perhaps he’ll be able to get rid of the worst of the sand, too, that seems to find its way into the bed, scratches him through whatever fresh clothes Martin brings him, collects in his shoes even if he doesn’t take them off.

Martin had agreed to take his sheets home to wash, brought him some new ones in, and offered to help with the rest of it, but Tim had declined, preferring to do what he can himself, and Martin hadn’t seemed offended.

It turns out that the safe room is in an even worse state than he had thought. Almost two years’ worth of building mess, files and dust and office supplies, no attempts made to sort through it since it had been repaired after Prentiss.

He tries, lays a box of statements out on the bed and starts to organise them by date, so that at least moving them back into the Archives proper might go a little quicker. They’re mostly discredited, he thinks, scathing notes scrawled across them in what he recognises as Jon’s handwriting. It’s from a better time, though, back when they had still had Sasha, and Jon had been a grouchy but decent boss.

Tim remembers him worrying over Sasha, after her encounter. Grudgingly letting Martin look after an abandoned dog for the morning, before he could get her safely to Battersea. Telling Tim he had really come through on something, a warm glow of pride that had taken a while to fade, despite how he’d tried to remember that he didn’t need external validation.

He’d been an asshole too, of course, especially to Martin, but he had still been _right_. This new Jon creeps and watches and sometimes looks at them like they’re stories yet to be told.

Tim sits, for a while, flipping through the statements, scanning through for Jon’s biro scrawls, lets himself grieve a man who isn’t and might as well be dead. As he shifts, he disturbs a stack of files behind him, and though he snatches for it, one of them slides off, behind the bed.

When he moves the mattress aside to go after it, underneath the slats of the frame, he can see a small cluster of dead flies, all lying on their backs, their legs curled around over their abdomens. He recoils, the light glancing iridescent green off a bluebottle as he moves.

The spiders, he decides, have clearly not been doing their jobs. There are enough webs about the place for him to know that they’re there. He’ll raise that to Martin, the next time that he catches him trying to explain to someone about their importance to the ecosystem, insisting that they should be more gentle with their eight-legged neighbours. Not that that’s a lecture he’s heard lately.

Whatever the reason, he’s going to have to clear these ones out himself.

It takes Tim a minute, to leave the safe room. He hasn’t been beyond the Archives since he got back, and his trips out have been short and uncomfortable. He usually only goes that way in the dead of night, if he’s woken from a start from one of the Danny nightmares, and needs something to soothe his nerves.

Martin’s already there, sometimes, with his own mug, and when he sees Tim, he’ll wordlessly get up and put the kettle on again. They don’t talk, then – Tim never knows what to say, because Martin is always in those dreams, too, Martin on one side and the thing that doesn’t breathe on the other, the one that he wakes from, his pulse juddering through his chest, every time he notices.

This time, it’s barely one in the afternoon, and he’s not sure what to expect. Can’t linger too long – Daisy will probably be by with sandwiches again soon, and Tim doesn’t like the idea of eating with those things under the bed. Too much risk of imagining those corpses crunching in his teeth, one hidden between the chilled slices of damp bread.

There’s not really a maintenance cupboard to speak of, in the Archives, so he goes to the communal area, digs out a dustpan and brush from under the sink. He manages to be laser-focussed on that, but when he turns to leave, he finds Basira standing against a cabinet nearby, waiting for the kettle, from what he can tell.

She’s got her head inclined, reading her book, and either hasn’t noticed him, or just wants to pretend she hasn’t. Her eyes don’t seem to move along the page, so he expects the latter.

That’s fine, he tells himself. If Basira wants to be suspicious, Basira can be suspicious. Jon can be suspicious, his stare boring into Tim every time that Tim flatly declines to let him take the album away for further study – he doesn’t want to see his own picture with the paper around it scorched, like some of the others in the album. And if he can deal with Jon’s scrutiny, for all that it stings in his chest like a nettle, he can deal with Basira’s decision not to interact.

He leaves her be, and starts back towards the safe room.

He’s almost there, when someone suddenly steps out of the wall immediately ahead of him. He nearly crashes into them, has to flatten himself into the wall to avoid it, holding up the dustpan and brush like some sort of domestic James Bond.

Melanie notices him at the same time, and takes a single, neat step to avoid him. She gives him a long, assessing glance, and then leans back to close the door that she’d come through. Tim glances at it as she does so, sure there hadn’t always been one there, and his lungs seem to tighten like the skin of a drum.

He takes another, longer step back. The door is yellow, with a black handle that it wants him to reach for. He had gone through it, once, ushering Martin ahead of him. Trying to flee from something that wasn’t Sasha and definitely didn’t look a damn thing like her, from Jon and everything that he represented, from something with sharp hands and a laugh that trickled through his head like the notes of a music box.

“What’s that doing here?” Tim demands, voice rough.

Melanie blinks, a frown pinching at her forehead.

“Helen helps us,” she says. It’s short and to the point and while he’s sure it technically answers his question, it makes no sense to him.

“Helen?” he echoes, his eyes trying to flicker to Melanie, so that he can talk to her properly, but he can’t drag them away from the door for more than half a second. “That’s Michael’s door, he took us–”

“No,” Melanie corrects him, and there’s a sharp, almost warning note to it. “Michael’s gone. He tried to kill Jon and the Spiral replaced him with Helen, remember? It was before you died.”

Tim doesn’t remember. Not really. There’s something faint about Michael being involved in rescuing Jon from the Circus, but he hadn’t heard it first-hand, or asked for or cared about details. No one had thought that it would be important to make sure he knew. Or he hadn’t _been around to tell_.

“Accepting help from monsters, then?” Tim glowers towards the door, wishes that it would vanish in the momentary lapse of his blink, but it doesn’t.

“She helps,” Melanie repeats, with a shrug that’s far too angular to be natural. “And unlike half the other people here, she hasn’t personally betrayed me.”

Tim snorts, opens his mouth to say something else, but Melanie turns her back and starts to walk off down the corridor. He tries to step after her, but something frantic squashes against his motor functions, won’t let him pass that door. His throat clicks, suddenly too try to call out.

In the end, he takes another route back to the safe room. It’s longer, but it gets him there. He checks the door before he opens it, then locks it behind him, for all the good that that will do. Pulls the bed away from the wall with a little more force than necessary, and picks up the fallen statement as gingerly as if it were covered in cobwebs.

He sweeps the flies into the dustpan, and blocks that section of wall out of his internal map of the Archives. He won’t pass it. Won’t go inside, and won’t wander for weeks, the only point of sanity left the place where his hand clutches Martin’s.

The flies collected, he glances along the edge of the skirting board, trying to check for any more. He can’t see any, even when he shines his phone torch along, but he expects that there will be others, somewhere, clustered among the boxes of files, behind the backs of the shelves.

At least he’s not going to be sleeping over them anymore.

He carries the dustpan out and around the long way round to the bin in the communal area, trying not to think too hard on why he doesn’t want to use the one in the safe room.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick warning that the art in this chapter contains blood.

Takeaways become a regular thing. It’s probably doing wonders for neither their health nor Martin’s bank account, but Tim finds himself looking forward to them. They sit, mostly in silence on the floor of the safe room, eating curry or pizza or Chinese or whatever Martin had chosen or Tim had requested, and he feels better. The tiredness that’s made it through to his marrow feels a little more distant, though if that’s energy from the food or the company, he can’t tell.

Daisy joins them sometimes, but never, Tim notices from what little she’s said, on nights when she could be spending her time with Basira, who seems to go out a lot, or Melanie, who is apparently trying to piece back together something that might be called a life. Daisy is not usually invited to go with Basira, and isn’t comfortable on her own, but she manages not to give Tim the impression that he’s second choice or a stopgap measure.

Tonight, it’s just the two of them. Martin still seems to have the appetite of a sparrow, picking at his food like he’s learned some horrible secret about the processes of the curry industry, but it’s better than it had been, and when he leans over to show Tim some video he’s found that he thinks Tim might like, it at least seems to be half-eaten.

Tim does like it, he supposes. It’s cute and funny and it makes him smile, but the world just feels like it has too much in it, sometimes, for him to get as into dogs charging through fountains as he would have before. Martin doesn’t replay it, and he cancels an autoplay that looks from the thumbnail like a puppy in a ball pit, so Tim supposes he probably feels the same way.

The door opens, just an inch or two, as though it had been pushed by a firm breeze, then swings shut again with a noise like a slap. Tim startles, glances around, half-expecting Jon or Melanie, because he still thinks of them as rude, though that’s probably unfair – Jon, to his credit, does usually knock, and he hasn’t seen Melanie since the incident in the corridor. There’s nothing.

He glances back at Martin, who slips his phone back into his pocket, and goes back to staring down at his naan bread without enthusiasm. Tim opens his mouth to ask if he wants it, plans to dress it up with something like the warm humour that they both would have enjoyed once, but nothing comes to mind, and all he’s been able to manage lately is tepid or scalding anyway.

Tim goes back to his own food, but he’s barely picked up his fork when the door slams so wide that it hits the bin with a metallic clatter like a gunshot. He flinches, wrenches his head up to try and see into the corridor beyond. There’s nothing there but the opposite wall. No yellow door or worm woman or mannequin.

He looks to Martin for some sort of explanation – perhaps some kind of really violent air conditioning, or maybe they’re working with a Vast monster on top of all the others, those ones had at least always sounded like _fun_ horrifying supernatural murderers – but Martin is frowning, too. Not towards the door, though. Not at anything in particular. His hand is up against the side of his throat, the gesture unnatural.

“What’s wrong?” Tim asks. He pushes his meal aside, trying to bring what he can remember of the Heimlich manoeuvre to mind, first aid courses he’d done too long ago drifting hazily at the periphery of his brain. “Martin?”

Martin coughs, manages a single violent rattle of a breath, and then his hand drops away.

Tim stops. Frozen in place for an instant, he can do nothing but stare. There’s a cut in the side of Martin’s neck, scalpel-precise, and the blood has already soaked into his collar, is staining out into his jumper.

“Martin!” Tim lunges for him, takeaway cartons and paper plates scattering, narrowly avoids stabbing a fork into his knee. He grabs Martin, presses as hard as he can onto the wound, trying to put pressure on it. Fresh blood wells up around his grip, turning it slick and sticky, and he clutches tighter, his other hand coming up to Martin’s cheek. “Fuck, Martin, hold _on_.”

Martin’s fingers wrap around his wrist, smearing red across his skin, and his eyes meet Tim’s, wide and wild with panic.

Tim screams. First for help, over and over until his voice is raw, almost scoured out of his throat. When Martin starts to go still in his grip, without words.

It feels like it takes hours for the bleeding to stop, the heart no longer beating. Martin’s skin starts to cool, and Tim staggers to his feet, his vision blurring. His arms stay as they are, for a moment, even as Martin falls the rest of the way to the ground, his touch sliding away from Tim. Tim’s hands shake in the air, still the right distance apart to hold him.

He stumbles out of the safe room, breath harsh and hitching. He doesn’t have to go far.

Jon is sitting in his office chair, the tape recorder in front of him still rolling. His eyes are closed, and the tear tracks down his face seem more like deep black ink than blood.

“Jon?” Tim whispers, without voice. He reaches out, meaning to touch his shoulder, slow and trembling because he _knows_ it won’t wake him.

The tape recorder crunches off, abrupt and final. Tim recoils, the motion tearing through him so completely that his head knocks into the wall of the safe room, the book he’d been reading about the Franklin expedition – that Daisy had declined to connect for him – clattering onto the ground. He rubs at his head, staring around, his breath coming in hard, harsh gasps.

He had never left for the Archives. There’s no blood. No Martin. _No Martin_.

Tim crawls over to the waste paper basket, slow, his limbs weak. He rummages through it, pushing aside sandwich wrappers and takeaway receipts. There’s a small, frightened part of his brain sure that it’s already gone, that someone must have come and emptied the bin, but then one shaking hand finds Martin’s crumpled number. He pulls it out, smooths the paper across, then starts to stab it into his phone, one cold, artificial digit at a time.

It only rings the once before it’s answered, and a blur of noise hits him from the other end, a general distant hum of chatter.

“Tim?” Martin says, muffled but unmistakable.

Tim lets out a long breath, tries to imagine the fear trickling out of him with it.

“Hey,” he says, swallowing, struggling to make himself sound like he has it at least a bit together. “Martin. Where are you?”

“In a queue,” Martin says. There’s a pause, and Tim imagines him shuffling the phone to his other ear. “Is fish and chips okay tonight? I thought–”

“Can you get here?” Tim asks, so casual that it loops around again into being obviously forced.

“I’ll be back in about an hour–”

“Now,” Tim says, forcing it out, as what little control he has over his voice starts to slip. “Please. If you can.”

“Sure,” Martin says. He hesitates, but Tim can hear his footsteps, tinny but there, the other voices starting to fade. “Are you okay? Do you want me to stay on the line?”

Tim hangs up. He sits back, lets his head drop into the wall again, and tries to use the impact to steady himself. It’s fine, he tells himself, trying to bring his breathing back under control. It’s _fine_. None of it had been real. He’d been dreaming.

Except, he hadn’t been. Hadn’t even been asleep. There had been no opening his eyes. Just one minute, Martin and Jon were dead, and the next, he’d been stepped back a scene. Rewound.

What if, he finds himself wondering, to fit with the swooping nausea in his stomach, it had been some kind of premonition. What if what he should have done was tell Martin not to come back to the Institute, got out himself, evacuated the whole building. He might have played into exactly that future by calling, might have–

Tim squeezes his phone, trying to ground himself, feels the buzz of journey updates beneath his fingers.

He stays like that, trying to trace Martin’s route through the underground in his head, map his walk speed onto the distance between the lines he’ll need. His mind goes too fast, and he finds himself sitting in an empty space of dead time, until there’s a knock at the door, and then Martin pushes straight on through.

Still alive. Still moving. He’s clutching his own phone, eyes flitting around the room, right up until they find Tim. His shoulders slump as he relaxes, letting out a steadying sigh.

“Are you okay?” he asks. It’s probably a stupid question. Tim knows he doesn’t _look_ okay. Isn’t, so he shouldn’t.

He doesn’t answer. Climbs to his feet and closes the door firmly behind Martin, flinches at the memory of how he had imagined – he _must_ have imagined – it slamming. Locks it.

“Tim?” Martin presses.

Tim turns back to him, takes a shuddering step into his space. He reaches out, takes Martin’s chin, carefully turning his head sideways so that he can see his throat better. The skin there is smooth and unbroken, warm against Tim’s fingers. It’s fine. _He_’s fine.

He lets out something a little too close to a sob, and an almost-laugh bubbles up into his chest, shaken loose by the relief of it all.

“Tim?” Martin says again. He’s watching Tim, studying him, a frown gathering. Alive. Safe. No blood, all over Tim’s hands.

Tim kisses him. He doesn’t think it through – the angle isn’t quite right, but he’s not about to move away to try again. Martin’s mouth is gentle, yielding, and there’s a small, surprised exhalation, just enough to part his lips. Tim deepens it, wraps a hand around the back of Martin’s neck, a strange, frantic sort of calm settling over his senses. He steps into him, pushing him back towards the wall, tasting mint on his tongue.

Martin breaks it before they can get there, the graze of his thumb light against Tim’s arm.

“Tim?” he murmurs, hushed.

“Please, Martin,” Tim manages, voice almost as raw as it had been when Martin had been dying.

Martin hesitates, and it seems to stretch out into years – _epochs_. Tim needs to keep going, to keep touching, to press his lips to that part of Martin’s throat that isn’t damaged, to know that with every one of his senses.

He nods, finally, and Tim closes the gap in less than a second, kisses harder. Martin steadies him when it nearly overbalances him, lets Tim crowd him back into the wall. Tim holds him there, checks his skin with fingers and teeth and tongue, while Martin strokes at his hair, his face, watches him with an almost-understanding that _aches_.

The frantic whirling in Tim’s head finally begins to settle, and he snatches at Martin’s wrist, pulls him back towards the bed.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Martin asks, still quiet – Tim won’t let him have the breath to make it any louder. He goes, lets Tim push him down onto his back, but he’s clearly waiting for a response, stops touching back.

Tim leans down over him, sets his back to what he knows is going to be an indelible memory, his mind still scraped and fevered from it.

“I’m sure,” he says, his voice stronger again. He runs a hand up the outside of Martin’s thigh, smiling as he shivers in response. “Are you?”

He has his answer in the way that Martin pulls him down into the next kiss, the way that his fingers brush under Tim’s shirt. The way that he says Tim’s name, like he’d thought he’d never get to say it again.

* * *

* * *

It’s the best Tim’s felt in a while. Lying there, his legs tangled with Martin’s and his face tucked against the back of Martin’s neck, everything he’s been trying to deal with – Jon, the album, the tiredness – seems a few steps removed. Distant. Like the flat bleak emptiness of a saltmarsh, from miles inland. It doesn’t bother him like it usually does.

He’s sure that will pass. That this is just a combination of afterglow and getting to be absolutely certain that Martin hadn’t bled to death in his arms that night. But that’s no reason that he can’t enjoy it while it lasts.

He brushes a kiss against the base of Martin’s spine, and Martin lets out a soft murmuring sound, already asleep, and far more peacefully than Tim had expected – maybe Martin’s feeling a similar warmth to him, or maybe Tim had just tired him out.

It’s the easiest thing in the world, for Tim to let his eyes slide shut, and go to join him in oblivion.

When he opens them again, it’s to look back out over the stage of the Theatre Royal. It’s not a surprise – more a sense of hollow despair, settling back into him like it had never left. He tries to let his head slump, but it won’t, because he has to see that the thing on the stage looks so much more like Danny now – if Tim doesn’t concentrate, he can almost see his brother, waving up at him like he had in nativity plays when they were younger, trying to get his attention. To make sure he’d been noticed.

Martin’s breathing hitches, and Tim sees him shift in his seat, wishes that he could manage the same, just enough to not see any of it. But he has to keep watching, has to know how his nightmare will play out this time.

He calls out, as he always does. The spotlight lights the room like a flare gun, too bright, but there’s no flinching to protect his eyes from it, only enduring the glare. Grimaldi claws its slow, torturous way to what could so easily be Danny, calls out its question to the unmoved stone audience. They don’t answer, don’t plead for Danny’s life, and neither does Tim.

There’s a faint motion from beside him – Martin’s arm has moved again, out onto the rest between the seats, palm held upwards. Tim can’t look at it, not properly, but his own hand moves to take it, fingers lacing with Martin’s. They sit and look out over his worst nightmare, holding hands like teenagers on their first date at the cinema.

Martin squeezes his hand, very gently, and Tim squeezes back. A little too hard, from the way that Martin’s breathing shifts. He tries to relax his grip, but then something on his other side moves, and he just ends up holding on even tighter. He would flinch from it, if he could, but he can no more manage that then he can turn his head to see what it is.

Down on the stage, something that isn’t Danny dances and imprints its dizzying patterns over the backs of his eyes, where they’ll pirouette through the day, and barely have faded by the time that he goes back to sleep.

The thing on the other side moves, again, and Tim gets the dull sense that it’s reaching for him, just as Martin has.

Tim startles back into the safe room, his heart trying to beat out of his chest, to get away from it all, from Danny and whatever it is that sits on his blind side. It’s dark, as dark as it gets, in there, and he means to stare out into it until his eyes adjust, until he becomes fully aware again, but as he does, he realises that Martin’s hand is still in his. He studies it for a minute, and when he glances up, Martin is looking right back at him.

“You’re having the dream too,” Tim says, dully. He can see it from the expression on Martin’s face, the sorrow that sits there.

Martin hesitates, uncertain, and Tim doesn’t have time for it.

“You know the one,” Tim tells him. There’s hardly anything else that he could be talking about, would never speak like this about whatever nonsense Martin’s used to dreaming about.

“Yeah,” Martin says, a heavy outrush of air. “I… I’m sorry. I didn’t know if you remembered it. I hoped you didn’t – I mean, you didn’t say anything.”

“It’s not really something that comes up,” Tim says. “What could I have said – _hey, Martin, been dreaming of my dead brother every night since you used that magic evil book to bring me back to life_?”

“I’m sorry,” Martin says, again, and Tim can hear that he means it.

“It’s fine,” Tim sighs, for all that it isn’t. “You could hardly say _hey, Tim, been dreaming of your dead brother every night since I used that magic evil book to bring you back to life_, either.”

Martin smiles, but there’s not really any feeling in it besides sympathy. Tim supposes he appreciates it, but he’s still prickly at the subject, his head starting to push into that sour summer’s height afternoon feeling again, where he’s ready to snap at everyone and everything.

“So, is that just going to be a thing now?” he asks. “The nightmares?”

“I think it’s something to do with the statement,” Martin says, slowly – Tim can feel his shrug through the mattress. “I know Jon gets them. I guess since you gave your statement to me, I’m getting them instead of him.”

“Better you,” Tim mutters. He doesn’t want to feel Jon’s remote stare from that seat, can’t imagine trying to take his hand.

“If I’d known that was what giving the statement would do, I’d have found another way,” Martin says, his words starting to tumble together. “It never happened before – maybe something to do with the Leitner? I don’t know how to make it stop. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Tim says, smooths his thumb against Martin’s hand. “If there’s nothing we can do, there’s nothing we can do.”

Martin takes a deep breath, and seems to relax again, his hold slipping away from Tim’s as he rolls slightly, more towards him.

“Do we need to talk about…” He gives a vague gesture, which Tim thinks must be meant to generally encompass the sex.

“No,” Tim says, like he has so many times before, as easy as Martin expects from him. “I don’t need to talk about it. Do you need to talk about it?”

“I guess not,” Martin says, hesitantly. “It’s just, you seemed really… spooked, on the phone, Tim. Did… did something happen?”

“No,” Tim says. That’s a lie, too, but Martin’s had enough upset for one night. So has he. “Everything just got to me a bit. I needed something else to concentrate on.”

“Sure,” Martin says, and he manages to keep any outright scepticism out of it. “Do, um… do you want me to go?”

“Martin, it’s the middle of the night.”

“Yeah – I mean, do you want me to be gone before morning?”

Tim sighs. He shuffles in slightly, wraps an arm around Martin as best he can, keeping him in place. It’s not a perfect fit, but Martin leans into the contact, and it’s enough.

“Stay here tonight,” he says. “Unless you don’t want _me_ to be there when you wake up.”

He can actually _feel_ Martin flush, the warmth spreading out through his skin. He can’t help but feel another little swell of that peaceful sensation, manages a half-smile. It seems like there are a lot of things that he’s going to have to get used to. This one, he doesn’t think he minds.


	8. Chapter 8

The statement isn’t working like it should. The summary hadn’t just come to Jon, how they have been. He’s having to read through it in silence first, but he can’t get past the third line – it’s his eighth time trying to get through it, to the point where he’d started wondering if it might be a false one. But an attempted recording of the first few sentences on his laptop had come out corrupted, so the issue must be somewhere else.

Perhaps, he thinks, it’s that the Archives or the Eye or whatever it’s supposed to be hadn’t guided him to it. It hasn’t been guiding him to anything, lately, but he still needs to record, and the place, the monster, knows that.

It should be easy to slip away into the statement, like it always had been, but instead it feels as though there’s something itching at the corners of his eyes, like sleep that he can’t manage to rub away, though he’d gone and splashed some water on his face six attempts ago. And it’s not just this one. He’s tried others, with the same result. There’s no help to be found in Daniel Tolson’s statement regarding a box, or the statement of an unnamed lighthouse keeper regarding the November fogs.

The statement of Anthony Bryant regarding an encounter with an invasive species is just the latest in a stack of failures. And he spends the whole time pretending that there might be some reason for it other than the fact that Gertrude’s leftovers aren’t what he really _wants_.

The knock at his office door is almost a relief. He straightens up, tries to have one last rub at his eyes in what he’s sure is a long-doomed attempt to look a little less like death warmed over, then folds the file closed like he hasn’t started looking at it yet.

“Come in!” he calls.

It’s Basira. She pushes the door all the way open first, which Jon has also noticed Daisy doing – maybe some sort of police training, Jon thinks, a preventive measure against people waiting on the other side. His head itches with the possibility of just finding out, but he reminds himself, as firmly as he can, that Basira prefers it when he doesn’t. He can hardly trust himself to be around any of them if he can’t even exercise the bare minimum of self-restraint.

She steps inside, giving Jon a long glance as she does so, like she’s checking to make sure that he hasn’t grown any excess eyes in the last few hours.

“Hey,” she says.

“Basira.” He attempts a smile, and the one she returns is about as genuine. “What can I do for you?” He can be a resource, if that’s what she needs. 

Basira pulls out a chair, checks it – Jon’s head buzzes with the fact that he doesn’t know what for – and then sits.

“The thing in the safe room,” she says, voice held carefully neutral. “What do you reckon?”

Jon sighs, glares back down at Anthony Bryant’s statement like this whole mess is its fault.

“I don’t know,” he says, the inadequacy of it like a burn in his throat.

“You don’t know?” Basira echoes. “_You_? Don’t _know_?”

“No,” he says. “Either he can lie to me or he – _it_, it thinks it’s Tim.” He shakes his head, trying to push the frustration away. “He certainly hates me like the real Tim.”

“A lot of monsters hate you,” Basira reminds him. “I wouldn’t take it as proof.”

“You have a point.” Jon leans back in his chair, exhales. “I really don’t know. Martin certainly thinks it’s him, and Martin’s the one who’s been spending the most time with him.”

“Martin might just be seeing what Martin wants to see,” Basira comments, voice hard. “We know they can make you do that. Have you spoken to him about it?”

“Not really.” Jon runs a finger over the handle to his desk drawer, the one that contains everything he hadn’t known what else to do with. “I’ve been trying to–”

“Give him space, yeah, I know.” Basira gestures it away, impatient. “We all know. You’re doing a better job of avoiding him than he was doing when he was working for Peter.”

“Martin wants to keep his secrets.” Jon’s hand has started to scratch at the drawer, and he forces it to relax. “I am… not the best person to be around, for that. I’m trying to respect his boundaries. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?”

“Not if his boundaries could get people hurt,” she says, still sharp. “This isn’t about Martin – it’s about what’s probably a monster, that we’re just letting sit around in our basement.”

“I haven’t been able to find out anything more about the photo album Leitner Martin used,” Jon says, pressing on. “No sign of the statement yet – from the looks of it, aside from the attempts at destruction and the obvious effects, it does just seem to be a normal album. Tim – _if_ it’s Tim – doesn’t want me to take it away to look at.”

“If people have been trying to destroy it, it’s probably not that great,” Basira argues. “And you think it being protective of the Leitner is a good sign?”

“It could be something,” Jon admits. “Or it could just be Tim being Tim.” He sighs again, and it feels like all that he ever inhales is doubt. “And if it is him – _really him_ – then I’ve got a second chance. I don’t want to just end up in a worse place than we were in before the Unknowing. We used to be… maybe not friends, but we didn’t used to hate each other this much. I… I’ve missed him.”

“Hm.” Basira is considering him, and he can guess what she’s about to say – something about where his priorities should be – and he doesn’t want to hear it. Has heard it enough times already.

“Was this just about Tim?” he prods, and she shoots the sort of narrow-eyed glare at him that she uses when she thinks he’s been snooping around in her head. “I didn’t. Just, trying to change the subject. I don’t know if it’s really Tim. It hasn’t hurt anyone yet. We’ll have to wait and see.”

Basira gives him a last, level glance, and then lets it go, for the moment.

“It’s probably nothing,” she says. “But there have been a couple of people, outside the Institute. Not any of the ones we already know about. No closed eye pendants or anything. But they’re definitely watching the place.”

“Any chance they’re just tourists?” Jon suggests, though he can hear more weariness in it than he can actual hope. “Come to gawk?”

“Could be,” Basira says. Sounds like she’s as confident in that idea as he is. “I’ve not seen any of them more than once. But they seem super intense.”

“People can be,” Jon says. “But I’ll keep an eye out. I’d really rather not have another problem to deal with right now.”

“Me neither.” Basira shrugs, glances over at the pile of files on his desk. “But the way things are for us? We have to look at everything like it’s going to be a problem.”

“And we’re back to Tim again,” Jon says, resigned. “It _could_ be him, Basira.”

“Yeah,” she says. She stands again, apparently has everything that she needs. “But it could not be. When have we ever been that lucky?”

“Daisy,” Jon says, without hesitation. He’s thought this himself enough times to know the answer.

“Right,” Basira says. He expects her to bristle, still protective, but instead she nods. Casts him one last glance before she heads for the door. “And do you really think we’ve been that lucky twice?”

* * *

It is, Tim thinks, right up there on the list of the worst ideas that Martin has ever had. The individual components are sound enough – the suggestion that he should get out of the Institute for a little while probably isn’t a bad one. Whatever concerns Martin has – Vitamin D deficiencies or lack of activity or whatever – are so far down Tim’s list of potential things that might kill him as to be totally insignificant, but they’re not invalid. Perhaps he’ll need the exercise for running away from things. And at least he’ll have something to look at that isn’t the safe room’s four walls or the _guess how this one’s connected to what’s going to murder us_ book club.

Jon probably needs to get out, too. He’s practically modelling lack of natural light, and badly.

The bit where it all falls apart is where Martin had apparently decided it was a good idea for them all to go together. Tim should have said no the second he had asked, but it had been a lazy morning, tangled together in bed, the day seeming impossibly far away, and Martin had looked so damn _hopeful_.

But Jon isn’t far away anymore, and Tim catches him staring four times before they’re even out of the tunnels, his eyes glimmering in the light of Martin’s torch like those of some sort of nocturnal animal. Still scrutinising. Probably trying to work out if Tim’s planning on killing them all in their sleep.

It hadn’t been a good look on him two years ago, and it certainly isn’t now.

It’s drizzling steadily, when they finally step out into London. Tim supposes that he shouldn’t have expected anything else. He doesn’t care, really – it’s been a long time since he’s felt the rain on his face, so he walks out into it, his phone safely tucked away in the pocket of his waterproof. It’s the same coat he’d had before, kept safe in Martin’s barely-used flat, and it’s always been good at keeping the wet out of anything important.

With the clouds sitting low over the tops of the towers, it’s not as overwhelming as he had thought it might be. The rain may be the equivalent of being attacked by a plant mister, but it still feels like a relief. Tim takes a long breath in, and then glances back for the others.

Martin’s taking a little longer to come out, blinking in even the dour light like a mole forced from its burrow, and while Jon doesn’t look particularly bothered by it, his eyes as open as ever, he really doesn’t look like he belongs anymore.

“Did you forget the way?” Tim asks, managing to paste a smile onto his face, even though he can feel Jon watching him again. It’s to be expected, he tells himself, though his mind prickles with it anyway. It’s not just Jon, either. Martin and Daisy are the exceptions, not the rules.

“Sorry,” Martin says, taking a step out to join him. “We just, don’t leave the Institute much at the moment.”

“Yeah,” Tim says. “Daisy said. All the monsters out to get us.”

Still hanging back, Jon’s eyes finally skip away from him, in favour of watching the people walking past, a procession of umbrellas and waterproofs, like he’s checking for them.

“So,” Tim says, gesturing Martin out along the street. “What’s the plan? Get lunch and go back?”

“If that’s what you want to do,” Martin says, lets himself be ushered into a slow, steady gait. “I didn’t really make a proper plan, I just thought it would be good for the three of us to–”

“Get out of the Institute, yeah,” Tim says. He almost makes a comment about the weather, but he doesn’t mind it.

“Is there anything you need to do?” Martin prompts. “You’re the one who’s not been outside for the longest.”

“Is that just because you’re counting the time I was dead?” Tim raises an eyebrow at him. “Because I don’t think that counts.”

Martin hesitates like he’s actually having to do some calculations on that, and that’s enough for Tim to know that it’s definitely been too long since he got any fresh air, or, at least, what passes for it in London. He glances back – like he’s waiting for Jon to make a decision, Tim thinks, with a twinge of impatience that he has to bite back on – but Jon hasn’t caught up with them yet.

He’s standing still, only about a metre out from where they had started, staring into the window of one of the coffee shops that line the street, with an intensity that sends a shiver up Tim’s spine. And he’d thought the way Jon looked at _him_ was uncomfortable.

Martin lets out a sharp breath, and starts back towards him immediately. Tim trails uncertainly after him, considers a sullen kick at a puddle.

“Jon?” Martin says. His voice is soft, like he’s approaching an unfamiliar animal – Tim had heard him talking to nervous dogs like this more than once. “Jon, leave it.”

Jon doesn’t give any sign that he’s aware of Martin’s presence. Just keeps staring, unblinking, his body held unnaturally motionless.

Martin seems to steel himself, inhales and holds it, then steps between Jon and whatever he’s looking at. For a second, it doesn’t seem to have done anything, and then Jon’s eyes flicker off to the side. By the time he focusses on Martin again, they’ve lost something of that edge.

“Leave it,” Martin repeats, just as quietly.

“Yes,” Jon says, though it’s cracking around the edges.

“We should go.” Martin turns back towards Tim, the worry lines sunk deep into his features. “Let’s just have a quick walk along the river, okay?”

“Not really,” Tim says. “I want to know what _that_ was.”

Martin’s face falls. He knows it was the wrong thing to say to salvage any part of the doomed expedition, but he can’t let it go. Something had been wrong, and if Martin is going to expect him to be around Jon, then he needs to explain.

“It’s nothing,” Martin says. “Tim, let’s just–”

“There’s someone in that café with a statement,” Jon says. He moves to join them, and his voice almost has that plaintive tone again, the one he’d used when he was trying to insist that he was still himself. “I can sense it. It can get a bit difficult to ignore, sometimes. But I am trying.”

“What would have happened if Martin hadn’t been here?” Tim demands. He knows his voice is starting to rise, can see it in Martin’s anxious glance. “Would you be in there now, ripping it out of them? A whole archive full of nightmares not enough for you? You’ve got to go and find them free range now?”

Jon hesitates, his eyes flickering towards Martin, and then back to Tim.

“I should probably go,” he says. “I’ll see you back at the Institute.”

“Jon–” Martin tries to protest, but Jon holds up a hand. Has the good sense to use the one without the burn scar. That probably wouldn’t do anything to assuage Martin’s worries.

“I think it’s for the best,” he says, and inclines his head towards Tim. “You enjoy your fresh air.”

Tim can almost see the moment that Martin relents, but it’s not until about ten seconds after Jon has already walked away. He half-turns back towards Tim, but doesn’t start moving himself. Lingers, and Tim can see that he’s watching Jon leave. There’s a rush of annoyance so strong that he almost doesn’t notice _when_ Martin stops looking – just after Jon has gone past that café.


	9. Chapter 9

Jon doesn’t stop until he’s at the river. He stands there, looking out over the grey sweep of the Thames, and tries to control his breathing, his forearms pressed against the cold metal of the railing. He welcomes the chill against his skin, though it’s almost aching. It’s better. _Anything_ is better than the feeling of trying to walk away from the presence of that person in the café.

He can still sense exactly where they are – furthest table from the door, with their back to the glass window. That doesn’t matter – he wouldn’t need to see their face to pick them out. The shape of their story is like a missing piece in his head. He can almost smell it, something tugging at his instincts, deeper in his mind than the odour of the wet tarmac.

They have no idea that he’s there. He could still go back, catch them on their way out or go in, sit opposite. Make them tell him everything. They’ll feel better, just for a little while, and then he’ll drag them back down into their horrors, complement the fear they already have with one of him. Standing and watching as they suffer, night after night after night, never helping, never sympathising.

It would be so easy, and it would be the relief of a rainstorm after a decade of long, dusty summers.

He can’t. He mustn’t. The others think it’s wrong. Some days he agrees with them, and otherwise he has to use them as a gauge for when he can’t tell that himself. The rightness of a thing just seems to stop mattering, sometimes, his head only using the metric of _want_. Even when it does, the squirming thing in his mind still has an answer for it. It’s better for the world, it insists, keen and turning in coils around his consciousness, if he’s stronger. That way, he can stop more monsters. What are a few more bad dreams, after all, compared to what something like Jared Hopworth or Jane Prentiss will do?

Doing those sorts of sums upsets the others. He tries to stick to the one they’ve given him, the one that tells him that he’s not allowed.

For now, he can manage it. If he gets too desperate, starts to feel like his brain is itching and fevered from need, he can always go back to the Archives, and find something that’s already there to record. No new people in his nightmares that way.

He wonders how many Gertrude had had, by the end. How she had ever managed to fit them all in a single night’s sleep.

Eventually, the prickling sensation across the back of his scalp starts to fade. The person with the statement must have finished their medium cappuccino with one added packet of sugar, and are heading out into the street, soon to be lost again in London’s anonymous mass.

He could pick their name and address from the ether, if he wanted, learn where to find them and turn up there, be waiting outside when they get back. But it would take effort, more than he can expend without trying to. For now, he can let them be.

The absence is half a relief, and half sets the warped spectre of his own want skulking and snarling around his psyche, insisting that he go out and find something else, someone else.

Jon pushes it away as best he can, but that just lets other feelings bubble up to the surface. Guilt. He should have controlled himself better. Martin shouldn’t have had to step in. Tim shouldn’t have had to see.

He could, he thinks, have just lied. Claimed he’d thought he’d seen something, something dangerous, in the café, but that it had turned out to be nothing. Then he could have stayed with them, they would all have done whatever it was that Martin seemed to think it was a good idea for them to do, and maybe it wouldn’t have been entirely awful. That was what he’d wanted, after all. To have them back. Treat them better. Not lose them again.

But Martin would have known something was up, and the lie would just have been a new tear in the remains of their relationship, something else he has to make amends for. And it would hardly be a good way to build bridges with Tim – _if_ it’s the real Tim. He deserves to know the truth, the shape of the world that he’s been brought back into. He’d been right that Jon keeping things from them hadn’t ended well, no matter how Martin seems to think he should be eased into it.

No, telling him had been the right thing. It doesn’t matter what Jon wants. If Tim doesn’t want to be around him, it’s a fair enough decision. He’s said he’s trying, and he has to keep that true. Do _better_.

There’ll be no trying to catch up with them, and certainly no letting the knowledge of where they’ve gone seep through his door.

Jon straightens a little, pushing himself away from the railing. The person with the statement is completely gone from his senses now. He could go back that way, sink like a stone back into his Archives.

But Martin had wanted him to get out for a bit. He still thinks of him, still worries, and Jon holds onto it like a shard of broken pottery.

He starts to walk along the river, just a little way. Tries not to look too hard at the people who go past – he thinks he could resist another statement, if it came to it, but it’s easier not to see them in the first place, and for the moment, with Anthony Bryant’s statement only forced out into the recorder that morning, that’s still an option.

A small dog growls at him as he goes past, pulling against its owner’s tug on the lead. It wouldn’t be able to reach much higher than Jon’s shoelaces, but it’s still doing the best that it can, a strangling snarl in its throat, all hackles and sharp bared teeth that he would heal from in an instant.

The woman hauls it away, alternating apologies with admonishments, and he makes a polite noise of acceptance without looking. Silently tells the dog that there isn’t very much that it would be able to do. It doesn’t hear him, but eventually he passes from the range of its concern, and it goes quiet again, little canine brain finding new things to occupy itself with.

It is, he supposes, nice to breathe the fresh air again. He’s not left the Institute lately, not for much beyond his excursions with Basira, and even then there is only sometimes a stretch of sky between him and the black and yellow of Helen’s door.

Maybe it is worth it to, just sometimes, take a look at the world that he’s supposed to be saving.

He just wishes that he could have done it with the others. If it’s really Tim, then he could fill a book with all the things that he regrets never saying. And for all that it’s reasonable, that he doesn’t have the right to expect otherwise, as he lets his stare sink down into the darkness of the Thames, he’s sure that instead of resolving any of it, he’s just going to be able to write a sequel.

* * *

“Well,” Tim remarks, trying to push his voice through past any of the discomfort in his gut. “You tried. It didn’t work. Chalk it up to experience. Why don’t we head back to the Institute?”

Martin shoots him a glance, and in that instant, Tim can see him as he used to be, after Prentiss’ attack. Trying to weigh and measure any course of action between the two of them, utterly unable to go in any direction, too afraid he’ll lose the other.

Tim steps closer. He links his arm with Martin’s with a whisper of waterproofs, and leans in.

“There are nicer things we could be doing,” he says, into Martin’s ear, before pressing his lips briefly against the skin underneath it. He’s rewarded by a brief shiver and a quickly stifled smile, warm despite the grey of the day.

“We need to get some fresh air,” Martin reminds him, but he doesn’t sound fully convinced, wavering on the edge of persuadable. “And exercise.”

“We,” Tim says, wrapping his other hand around Martin’s wrist, brushing his fingers over the pulse point, feeling it jump in response. “Can _get_ exercise.” This close, Tim can see where the tiny droplets of rain have caught in his hair, like little crystals, silver in the scant light. He wants to kiss him. Isn’t sure he can.

Martin starts to walk, in completely the wrong direction, his arm sliding away from Tim’s grip. Tim closes his eyes for a moment, and then quickens his pace after him.

“We can do that later,” Martin says, speaking away from him.

“I don’t know what makes you think the offer is still going to be open later.”

Martin looks back his way for just long enough to raise an eyebrow, and Tim sighs.

“Fine,” he says, swerving around a puddle, having to step away while something in his chest just wants to link their arms again. “What are we doing?”

“Lunch,” Martin says, more decisive than Tim had expected. So much so that for a moment he thinks Martin might pull him back towards that café Jon had been looking into, like he thinks it wouldn’t be completely transparent to stand guard, but he doesn’t. “You’ve been complaining about the canteen sandwiches basically since you got back.”

It’s a date, Tim doesn’t say. It isn’t. They haven’t talked about whatever this thing they’re doing is, but neither of them has agreed to any feelings, to being anything. It’s just sex. Something to make it all a little more bearable for both of them. He isn’t going to be the one to make it weird, try to push it into what it isn’t.

“You’d better be buying,” he says, instead.

“Sure,” Martin replies. He’s a little distracted, doesn’t catch Tim’s assessing look, as he wonders if _assistant to Head of the Magnus Institute_ comes with that much of a salary increase. Or maybe it’s just that Tim hadn’t been getting any wages while he was dead. He likely isn’t getting any now.

He stays quiet, even after they’ve found somewhere appropriately cosy, settled near enough to the door that they’d be able to get out in case of emergency – they hadn’t discussed it, but Tim had recognised the brief calculations on Martin's face, had felt them on his own barely a second earlier – and ordered.

Tim doesn’t push him. Neither of them are as chatty as they used to be, and it’s normally not unpleasant. Usually, being quiet together feels companionable, peaceful. But this time, Martin clearly has something that he wants to say.

He doesn’t, until their drinks have been brought over. Must need to have something else he can reasonably be looking at, a distraction.

“About Jon,” he manages, finally, grudgingly, like the phrase is a bramble stem, words catching like thorns in his throat.

“What about him?” Tim says. Too guarded, too steady, even to his own ears.

“He _is_ trying,” Martin tells him. “I know he’s… very different, from how he used to be. And it did get bad there, for a little bit, but he doesn’t wa– he’s making an effort _not_ to be– he’s–”

“A monster,” Tim fills in, short and sharp. “He is. A monster.”

“Maybe he’s not exactly human anymore,” Martin admits, with a sigh that stirs the surface of his tea. “But he’s not like Prentiss. He’s not going about mindlessly pulling information out of people anymo– he’s not. He has a choice, and he’s making the right one. He’s still Jon, too.”

“So people keep saying,” Tim says, still unnaturally smooth. “But that doesn’t fix _everything_. He was Jon when he was stalking me. When he accused us of killing Gertrude. When we ended up in those _fucking corridors_.”

“He made some mistakes–”

“_Did he_?”

“He made some mistakes,” Martin repeats, slightly more forcefully. “He did. I’m not trying to pretend they weren’t awful. Really bad. But he knows it wasn’t right, and he’s apologised and he’s _trying_, and I don’t expect you to forgive him, but–”

“But you do,” Tim cuts in, a pulse of anger in it. “Or we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”

“No,” Martin says. “No, it’s not that – of course I want you to get along like you used to, but he hurt you and there’s no reason why you should. But… you didn’t forgive me, either. And I’ve done at least as much to you as Jon has. I… I didn’t support you, properly, after Prentiss. I wasn’t there for you after the corridors, I was a terrible friend, and then I went and–”

“You _tried_,” Tim snaps. “Did you do enough? No. Nowhere close. But at least you were _trying_ to help. He was only ever making everything worse. I can’t give him what I do you.”

“I don’t expect you to,” Martin says. “Just, try to be a bit less aggressive with him?”

“No promises,” Tim growls.

Martin sighs, stares down into his tea.

“Look,” Tim says, makes an effort to calm his voice again. “I don’t want to talk about him. You’re not going to change my mind. If you keep pushing, we’re just going to argue, and then we’re both going to feel terrible, and this was supposed to make things better, wasn’t it?”

Martin gives him a wan nod, and attempts a smile that’s as tepid as the mug he’s mostly been using to hide behind.

“You, um,” he says, tapping his fingers against the ceramic. “You do know I didn’t do it for him, right?”

“Yeah,” Tim says. Doesn’t expand on it. There’s a tug in his mind, trying to tell him that he should reach out, take Martin’s hand, squeeze it. He won’t.

“What did you want to talk about, then?” Martin asks, making the moment pass, and Tim’s glad of it.

“I’m not sure that _talking_ was on my agenda at all,” he says.

“Tim.”

“Fine,” Tim says. He skews his eyes sideways, trying to pick out something suitably inconsequential for them to talk about. There’s a dog being walked past the café’s window, but all he gets is the briefest impression of soggy brown fur and small paws, and then it’s gone before he can point it out. A man in the corner is reading a newspaper, but the headlines splashed over it are something about politics, and Tim doesn’t mind staying out of the loop on that a little while longer, when he’s got the supernatural world to deal with as well. “How’s the tea?”

It’s a poor effort, but it works, for now. Even though, Tim knows, each of them is still thinking of other things.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick warning that the art for this chapter contains some dead birds.

Tim dozes. Keeps himself suspended, in a state somewhere between sleep and waking, just warm and thoughtless for a while. It’s easier with Martin there, especially after sex – they’re both drowsy from it, but it’s only just past late afternoon, too early to sleep, so they just lie there. The bed isn’t big enough for them to give each other space, and Tim enjoys the proximity.

Lunch hadn’t been so bad, in the end, and once they’d got back, Tim hadn’t minded keeping his promises. Their conversation in the café had burned away like a morning mist, and he’s as near to content as he can get, the taste of Martin’s lips on his tongue and still close enough to refresh it when it fades.

When he opens his eyes, Martin has shifted around a little – he remembers it, vaguely, thinks he’d made some faint noise of complaint at the rearrangement, but Martin had said something apologetic and soothing in response, and it hadn’t been so drastic a movement that he’d needed to correct it himself. He’s watching something on his phone, the light from the screen blurring the shadows away from his face.

Tim ignores it for a little while, in favour of examining Martin. He brushes his fingers along his skin, counting the freckles and marks, mapping them, and enjoys the way that Martin twitches whenever he finds a particularly sensitive bit. Files them away to test with his lips, later. Then Martin moves again, his head bumping awkwardly against Tim’s shoulder, as though he’s trying to find the right way of holding the phone to get rid of the reflections, and Tim cranes around, trying to see it better.

“What are you watching?” he murmurs.

Martin angles the phone so that Tim can see it too, and skips the video back to the beginning. The screen shows an evening sky, pale grey with touches of orange down towards the horizon, but it’s clearly not going to be a spectacular sunset. The person with the camera – thankfully held fairly steadily, and not shaking all over the place as if in a specific effort to make any and all viewers giddy and uncomfortable – is standing in a field, though it seems to be lying fallow. There are a number of trees clustered around the perimeter, indistinct patches of darkness. The focus shifts, and what had at first looked like a number of black specks in the sky finally acquire a distinct shape. Birds – thousands of them.

“They’re starlings,” Martin says, quietly, as though there’s a voice-over that he doesn’t want to interrupt. There isn’t. Not even some public domain classical music pasted over it to try and keep it engaging. The only sound is the breathing of the person filming, a faint scratching against the mic, and Martin turns the volume down until it’s inaudible.

The flock seems to billow through the air, moving in constantly shifting patterns across the darkening sky – every now and again, it bursts like a pierced water balloon, and what must be hundreds of birds pour into the trees below them, before it surges up into the air again.

“They do this before they roost,” Martin says. “People think maybe it confuses predators. They’ve done these models, and they think that as they’re flying, each bird is coordinating with seven others around it, and it results in things like this.” He pauses, just watching the video for a few seconds. “It’s called a murmuration.”

“Hm,” Tim says. He closes his eyes again, and lets his head rest against Martin’s shoulder. He tries to picture them in that video, imagines that they’re there watching it, instead of on a tiny phone screen. Standing in some winter field, warmly dressed, holding hands, breath misting. Above them, the flock crashes and seethes like waves over a cloudy shore, threatens to bring the sky down on them, only to pull it sideways at the last possible moment.

In Tim’s head, Martin points, craning his neck to stare up at a particular section of the flock – it’s splitting away, as though one of the birds had made a mistake, but its fellows had just followed it anyway. The new shape compresses, expands again, like something breathing, and then passes back into the first company and is absorbed.

There’s another downward rush a moment later, and Tim squints at the point where they’re cascading into the trees – there must be hundreds there already, lining the branches, and he struggles to make them out as the landscape dims towards dusk.

Instead, he’s startled by a heavy thud, somewhere to his left. He starts around, frowning at a dark shape on the ground. One of the birds, fallen. Lying there, the grass stems crushed under it, head tucked around at an uncomfortable angle. Dead.

Tim glances up, trying to see if there is a predator in the flock after all, a falcon that had torn through it like a stone through wet paper, but above him the sky continues to twist and dance with an uninterrupted, dizzying throng of birds.

There’s another thump. Then another. And another. Martin isn’t watching in wonder anymore – he’s afraid, eyes wide, and he’s saying something that Tim can’t hear, his voice drowned out by the snaps and crashes as the flock starts to fall around them. When he looks up, he can see them just _stopping_, mid-flight. They tumble gracelessly down, the rush of air catching at their wings, wrenching at them as if in a last desperate attempt to get them to fly again.

He loses his grip on Martin’s hand under a rain of birds, the staccato strikes of them hitting the ground so loud in his ears that he can scarcely hear even when Martin is screaming his name. He loses sight of him in the maelstrom, his last glimpse one of him hunching, arms wrapped protectively around his head, staggering towards the treeline.

Tim just stands and stares. He doesn’t need to duck away. Doesn’t need to run. They don’t hit him.

He’s still standing there when the sky is empty, a near-perfect circle of clear ground around him, and the rest of the field gleaming black with feathers.

“Tim?”

Tim blinks back to himself, sitting straight up, Martin watching him with a soft concern that’s so at odds with the terror he’d seen that he has to swallow hard to control his voice before he can say anything.

“What?” he manages, eventually, steadier than he’d thought it would be.

“You’ve gone really pale,” Martin says. He brushes a strand of hair back from Tim’s face, gentle, and Tim wants to do the same for him, smooth away that knot of worry on his forehead. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” Tim says, forces a smile he doesn’t feel. “The wonders of nature, right?”

Martin chooses to believe him, for the moment, doesn’t press it. Tim settles back down, and tries to smother that troubled feeling, opening like a crack in his ribs. Just his imagination, he tells himself. He’d always had a good one. His schoolteachers had always said, from Mrs Rafferty in the English department who had praised it and hoped he’d end up doing something creative with his life, to Mrs Peters in Maths who’d frowned and told him he shouldn’t let it run way with him like that.

By the time that Martin starts to extract himself, casting about from his clothes, Tim almost believes it himself.

* * *

* * *

Jon doesn’t mean to see. That in itself is unusual, lately – so much of his life these days consists of seeing. Of noticing what he has to, before it notices him. Getting out ahead of things, before they can hurt him or any of the people he loves.

That’s part of why he’d gone to the safe room in the first place – Basira had texted him, while he’d been out, reminding him to keep his eyes open. Something about her suspicion that there were new people watching the Institute, and by the time that he had got back to the Archives, it had been weighing heavy on his mind.

He hadn’t warned Tim and Martin. Not intentionally, but from the combination of Tim and the person in the café, he’d forgotten. He had tried to tell himself that it wasn’t really new information – Martin knows to be careful out there, that the Institute’s being watched, but the threads of his worry had just tightened and tightened until they almost felt like they were cutting him.

It wouldn’t hurt, he had decided, if he just went down to the safe room, to check that they had made it back okay.

As he’d approached, he had noticed that the door was ajar, and he’d taken it as a good sign. It had given him the opportunity to look in without knocking, just make sure they’re there without disturbing them, and then he’d be able to go back to his office without risking another confrontation with Tim. He’d stepped to the edge of the door, and looked through.

He sees. Martin is standing, straightening the hem of his jumper, and Tim is sitting on the bed, watching him with an unfamiliar expression, almost soft. Nothing like the hard, angry shapes that his face finds around Jon. He’s not wearing a shirt, and from the way that the sheet slips down against his middle, that’s not the only thing he isn’t wearing.

As Jon watches, Martin finally reaches a point where he’s satisfied with the state of his clothes, and starts to turn towards the door. Jon’s ready to bolt backwards, make it far back enough into the corridor that it will look like he’s only just been approaching, but then Tim stretches out an arm.

“Hey,” he says, protesting, and Martin sighs, turns back to him. The noise is fond, though, and so is the look on his face when Tim reaches up to pull him down into a kiss. He smiles through it. Seems happier than he ever has since he had come back to the Archives, and long before it, and that pierces Jon’s chest like a lance.

“See you later,” Martin says.

Tim grins, and doesn’t release him.

“You want some help with…” The pause is filled by the sound of his mouth on Martin’s again, his fingers tangling into Martin’s hair. Martin leans into it for a moment, makes a soft noise in the back of his throat. “Whatever it is you’re doing?”

“I don’t think you’re interested in helping me do anything constructive,” Martin says, as he pulls away. There’s no bite in it, and he’s still smiling as he starts back towards the door, Tim flopping dramatically back onto the bed behind him.

Jon walks away as quickly and as quietly as he can. Doesn’t stop until he’s safely back in his office, with the door locked behind him. Then he sits for a while, struggling in vain to stop his brain from teeming with questions.

How long had this been going on? Had they been together before the House of Wax? He doesn’t think they can have been – he remembers Martin’s farewell to the group, and though Martin had clearly been trying, and Tim had accepted a hug, he’d barely looked at him. He hadn’t been paying attention to any of it, just stood there in Martin’s arms until Martin had let go, with barely even a vague pat at Martin’s back in response. Thoughts only on his brother and the Circus.

Before that, perhaps? Jon had been absent even then, wouldn’t necessarily have seen it. Tim hadn’t been sure of Martin, when Jon had caught him out of the tunnels. Had had no way to be sure that he hadn’t been switched out like Sasha had. The possibility had affected him, though, badly. Not that that was unreasonable in any case. Maybe before, when they had only had each other. Maybe back before they’d all been assigned to the Archives, but Tim had still been wooing filing clerks and boasting about his conquests.

Something new, he decides, his stomach squirming. Perhaps Basira is right. Jon had wanted to trust him, but maybe this isn’t the real Tim, and Martin’s so blinded by the relationship that he’s missing the signs. Only seeing what he wants to see.

Not that Jon has seen any signs himself. It looks like the real Tim. Sounds like the real Tim. _Hates_ like the real Tim. Just not Martin, apparently.

Jon sighs, and shifts in his seat, trying to swallow a bitter taste in his throat. He doesn’t want Tim to hate Martin. Martin deserves not to be hated. But the whole thing sits wrong in his head. His brain keeps replaying the second of that first kiss – he should have been expecting it, considering what he’d looked in on. Martin had clearly only just got dressed. Tim hadn’t been bothering. There’s no reason it should have felt like ice water, not when they had clearly just–

He hadn’t wanted to see. He wishes that he could stop, but the scene refuses to settle into the other unimportant memories, presses down over any chance at new thoughts like a paperweight.

Martin had smiled. Jon had thought that the look on Tim’s face had been lost for good a long time ago. They’d looked _happy_, in that instant. With each other.

Jon should be happy too, happy for them. He tries, imagines the feeling and struggles to pull it up into being. It doesn’t seem to work, won’t fall into place. Instead, there’s just something like annoyance roiling through his gut, so unsettling that he wants a cup of tea to scald and soothe it away. But the only person who makes tea that does that is Martin, and Martin is half the problem.

Or, a third of the problem. None of it. Tim and Martin can do what they like, and if that’s what they like, then he has no right to feel anything about it. He’s not even supposed to _know_. It’s theirs, and private, and he taints it like droplets of blood wisping through water.

Jon starts digging around through the papers on the top of his desk, looking for a statement. Something to put him in someone else’s mind for just a little while, his own abruptly hostile, to him and to anything else. He finds one, but it doesn’t last long enough, and then he has no choice but to sit back in his own skull, and hate all the feelings in it.


	11. Chapter 11

Tim isn’t intending to do much, that evening. His original plan had been to not do much with Martin, but Martin had vanished off, muttering something about some admin work that needed his attention. Tim had lain there a while longer, trying to convince himself not to text, and then started to gather up his own clothes. Daisy might come calling, after all, and he doesn’t want anyone to know about him and Martin yet. He expects she would probably be fine with it, wouldn’t care, but the idea of eyes on them, even non-judgemental ones, is an uncomfortable prickle against his psyche.

He pulls a fiction book from a stack that Martin had brought him, paperbacks so new that they’d still had the receipt sticking out of them. Martin had whisked it out, flushing, and screwed it up into a ball, like they were a gift that Tim wasn’t supposed to know the cost of. He’d brought a bookmark, too, an old one that looks like it’s homemade, but it’s currently tucked into the shipping manifests, keeping the place of an item that Daisy had thought sounded suspicious.

The writing is sharp and punchy, but he starts feeling guilt from page one. Is half-sure that he should be doing something more constructive. Daisy had told him that there are monsters out there, things watching the Institute, the People’s Church of the Divine Host, marked out by their pendants, and the Flesh. She worries about a return visit from Jared Hopworth, stays troubled even when she says that they’re not focussed on any particular threat at the moment.

He’s not sure what good he would be. He’s hardly going to be able to fight off Jared Hopworth if Melanie couldn’t manage it in a frenzy of Slaughter, and it’s not as if anyone’s tried to give him any tasks more helpful than burying himself in airport thrillers. Most of them probably think he couldn’t be trusted with them.

Still, he puts it down before he’s even fifty pages in, and, as he stares around the safe room, trying to come up with something to do, his eyes land on the album again.

When he picks it up, something small and dark moves away with a loud buzzing sound – another fly, disturbed now. Tim glares after it, wondering where it could possibly have come from – it’s not as if the Archives have any windows open. It’s a long way down from reception, but he supposes that’s the shortest route it could have taken. He wishes it hadn’t gone to the trouble. He swats at it a couple of times, but it’s moving too fast, and Martin’s spiders clearly aren’t up to the job either.

He tries to concentrate on the album anyway, studying the faces just a short way back from his, wondering if they might be able to track them down, if they still can’t find the statement, but the buzzing cuts across his senses like a lawnmower. It even buffets into his head a couple of times, desperate in its attempts to find whatever it is it’s looking for – presumably not the way out, from how it keeps skating merrily past the door that Martin must have left ajar.

The edges of his own photo are still pristine, undamaged, but the last seven people back have all had someone try to rip or burn them out. Maybe the resurrected themselves, tormented by their new lives and trying to find their way back, or a disgruntled relative who realised that wasn’t what they had wanted after all, or someone like Gerard Keay, trying to destroy the whole thing.

The fly knocks into his forehead again, and he thinks, for a moment, _won’t you just die_.

Then he remembers that Martin had shut the door, properly, when he’d left, at his request. That he certainly hadn’t left through the one in the wrong wall, that’s yellow and black-handled.

Tim returns the album to the bedside box again, keeps his focus on the door as he does so, his eyes narrowing. The fly is gone from his senses, no longer even the slightest concern.

There’s a gentle knock from the other side, almost polite.

“I don’t want you here,” Tim says, standing, trying to gauge the distance between him and the corridor, wondering how long it would take him to cover it.

The knock comes again, and then the door opens the rest of the way. He tenses, ready to run, but the woman standing over the threshold doesn’t come any further in. Just waits there, watching him with hazy, almost placid eyes. She looks familiar – he tries to think back, and there’s a flash of memory he doesn’t want, his hand clutching at Martin’s, and they’re going to be wandering forever and then she is there and they’re running and Martin is protesting, but there isn’t _time_ and Michael is going to _kill them_.

“Helen, is it?” Tim says, with a calm that he doesn’t feel, his pulse jumping through his skin.

The woman nods. Her hands, where they rest against her door, are long-fingered and sharp.

“Fuck off,” Tim says. “Leave me alone.”

“I just wanted to come and have a look,” Helen says, and the acoustics of her voice do not match the room that they’re in.

“Sightseeing attraction now, am I?” Tim glowers, makes what he’s feeling as obvious on his face as he can, in case she’s having trouble remembering what emotions look like.

“Helen met you,” she says, utterly unbothered. “Before.”

“Yeah?” Tim picks up the thriller again, tries to make a show of looking at that, not at her, but it’s near-impossible to manage convincingly. Not when his instincts are still snapping at him to keep track of her. “Good on her.”

“I wanted to see if you were like she remembered you,” Helen tells him.

“And?” Tim pretends that he’s not pausing, waiting to hear the answer. He tells himself he shouldn’t. He knows he’s still himself, after all, and he doesn’t have to trust anyone else’s opinion.

“Mostly,” Helen says, with a slow smile that curls a little too high up her cheeks.

“Okay,” Tim gestures, without looking. “Now you’ve done that, could you fuck off?”

He manages not to look up at her, but he hears the door close, and by the time that he lets himself glance over towards it, it’s gone again. Part of him wants to get up, trace a hand along the wall where it had been, make sure that there’s no seam left in the plaster, but instead he just reads the same page of the airport thriller over and over again, unable to parse it, until another knock startles him so badly that he almost drops it.

It’s the right door, this time, though, and only Daisy. She opens it herself, leans around the doorjamb.

“Hey,” she says. “Just wondering if you wanted to come for drinks?”

“With who?” Tim asks, and the way that her face flickers tells him everything that he needs to know.

“Melanie,” she says. “And Jon. Basira’s going out, but if you wanted to ask Martin–”

“I’ll give it a miss.” Tim lowers his face, as pointedly as he can, towards the book. “Have a good time.”

Daisy glances around, as though checking the corridor, and then steps the rest of the way into the room.

“You can’t just stay in here forever,” she says. “You have to try and get your life back, or–”

“Maybe,” Tim cuts her off. “But I’ve had enough of Jon for one day. And don’t tell me he’s trying. Martin’s already given me that speech. It’s not working, so–” He gestures to the door. “Enjoy your drinks.”

Daisy waits there a few seconds longer, and then she gives a slow nod.

“See you tomorrow, then,” she says. The door shuts with a quiet click, and he’s left wondering if he would have gone, if Jon hadn’t been involved. He doesn’t know about Melanie yet – she doesn’t watch him the way Basira and Jon do, on the rare occasions that he’s encountered her around the Institute, but he still remembers her leaving Helen’s door.

There are just, he thinks, switching the thriller out for the album again, too many monsters around the place now.

* * *

The pub had been a mistake. Jon sits there, hunched into his seat, and struggles to remember why he had even said yes to Daisy in the first place. He shouldn’t have considered it, even for a second. Maybe, he had hoped that the raucous noise of wherever Daisy picked would have been enough of a distraction. That he would finally be able to relax and stop thinking about Tim and Martin and _Tim and Martin_, be back to being himself before the end of the night.

Instead, though he sits with his back towards the rest of the pub, facing the wall where Melanie and Daisy are sitting, he can still see a couple at the bar, their heads close together, reflected in the glass of a framed photograph of what the place had looked like, once. There had been another at a picnic bench on the way in, and he knows that if he turns around, he’ll see far too many tables for two.

The image of the couple is indistinct in the frame. It’s all too easy to imagine Tim and Martin in their place, together and separate. His beer tastes like ash on his tongue.

He feels, rather than sees, Daisy’s concerned glance. She keeps shooting them at him, clearly knows that something is up, but doesn’t know what and doesn’t like it. Jon can’t tell her. It isn’t his secret. If Tim and Martin ever want any of them to know, they’ll tell them themselves.

Jon wonders, with a slow simmer of resentment, how far they might get before Tim is even ready to be in the same room as him, let alone let him know something like that. Maybe they’ll have moved in together and got themselves a dog, and it won’t even be that they’ll tell anyone, it’ll be that someone will see them out in the park walking it, happy and hand-in-hand, and Jon will have to hear about it second-hand and pretend to be surprised.

He imagines the scene, the sunlight and the peaceful greenery, Martin carrying one of those plastic tennis ball launchers, though Tim always insists on doing it by hand, their dog a fluffy brown and white thing with a lolling tongue and soft ears, adopted into a good home. And then he dismisses it a moment later. The Archives are not the sort of workplace where its employees collect dependents. Not pets and not friends or family, people to stand around sadly at the inevitable funeral.

That’s why it’s so good that Tim and Martin have each other, he reminds himself, and goes back to scowling into his drink like it’s been watered down.

Melanie and Daisy are still talking about something, and he makes an effort to drag himself back into the conversation, even though he’s not sure what he can talk to them about. Melanie’s still not very comfortable around him, and he can’t go exacerbating that by publicly asking about her therapy. He doesn’t know much about her that’s not just going to rip open old wounds – Ghost Hunt UK, the thing she had built and then lost, the Slaughter, ghosts in India.

He thinks they’re discussing some sort of television programme, that he hasn’t seen and doesn’t know how to respond to. The only television in the Archives is some ancient thing that they have to wheel out, like they had at school when he was younger, and it was the end of the academic year and time for them to see the same fifty minutes of _Jurassic Park_ again. He doesn’t think that it even picks up anything live, had mostly been used for old VHS tapes.

Daisy and Melanie had probably watched it on a laptop, but he doesn’t remember noticing anything like that. Maybe they’ve been doing it after hours – Melanie still tends to research during the day, following up on things in the statements, because even if the Institute is a lie, that’s what she’s being paid to do, and they have nothing else.

As he half-watches, waiting for the conversation to turn to something that he can join in with, he notices Daisy smile at Melanie. Their hands brush, halfway between their drinks. It’s clearly intentional. Nothing about the gesture could have happened by accident. Melanie smiles back.

Jon pushes his chair back, mutters something about getting something to eat, and heads away towards the bar. Maybe they’re together, too, he thinks, sourly, his insides knotting ever-tighter. That would be as much his business as Tim and Martin.

“Can we get some chips?” he asks, once he’s made it to the front of the queue, hands over a ten pound note, and waits for his change.

A woman moves to lean against the bar next to him, offers him a smile. For a moment, with a rush of irritation, he expects her to try some pick-up line or other – it’s usually the last thing he assumes, but tonight, when everything just seems to be a signpost pointing him back towards Tim and Martin, it would be just the thing to put another black mark across his night.

“Hello,” she says, but her voice is casual, and doesn’t push into anything more suggestive. Good. Jon isn’t in the mood to put anything else down gently. She looks familiar, though he can’t place her. Medium build, her hair starting to grow out of what he has to assume is a stylish cut, and dressed like it’s an after-work outing – a formal skirt and blouse, with a jacket. If she works nearby, he supposes he might have seen her around before. There’s no hint on her of a story to be told.

“Hello.” He puts as much emphasis on the full stop as he can, makes sure that it could never be read as an invitation to talk. She doesn’t try, just keeps leaning there. Looks at him a little longer, but there’s no flirtatious smirk in her expression. Perhaps he just has an interesting face. He tucks his burned hand back into his pocket.

The barman hands him his change, and he goes back to his seat without a backward glance. She doesn’t follow, but things aren’t much better there anyway – Melanie must have told some kind of joke, because Daisy is laughing as he pulls out his chair. That’s good, he expects, that she’s feeling up to that. She _has_ seemed better – must be making progress with her therapy. But the way Daisy looks at her, pleased and fond, is enough to draw him back to that image of Tim and Martin. That kiss. Their faces. A moment of peace, something they have with each other only.

He’s probably just reading into it. After all, Daisy and Basira have this whole thing, still. He takes another sip of his beer, forces himself to swallow it, and then has another. He can’t really get drunk anymore – whatever won’t let him cut his fingers off must screen it as poison – but on a night like this, it’s easy to think that maybe he could try.

* * *

After Helen, the _safe room_ feels like the worst kind of misnomer. It’s not safe. Nowhere is safe – the monsters can get in wherever they go, open their doors and take them. Even in the Archives – Prentiss had come for them and Michael had come for them and Jared Hopworth had come for them, and Jon curls in the centre of it like a spider in its web.

Martin takes too long to come back. Time ticks on, long past when he would usually have turned up with food, and Tim’s mind weaves every second of it into new horrors, imagining Martin lost and alone in those corridors, or his skin crawling with worms, his own exhaustion refusing to let him push them aside.

He can’t stand it any longer. Leaves the safe room, not bothering to close the door behind him, and heads into the Archives.

All he finds is a closed laptop on Martin’s desk. When he rests his hand on it, it’s still warm. He had got caught up in emails, Tim decides. Clearly hasn’t long-finished his work. There’s no reason to think that something might have taken him. No texts or missed calls.

Martin has probably gone back to the safe room, on his way back to Tim. He’d likely just missed him. There’s no evidence that he might have wandered into any doors that aren’t there.

When he gets back, the safe room is wide open, and Martin is sitting on the bed with his back towards Tim, hunched over something. He pauses, brain insisting that he’s seen bits of horror movies like this, but Martin stays silent, and doesn’t seem to be in any sort of distress. He heads inside, taking the time to close the door behind him.

He lays a hand on Martin’s shoulder, intending to turn him into a kiss, but Martin starts so violently that whatever had been in his lap clatters hard onto the floor, crashes with a second, duller impact into one of the boxes. At the same time, there is a rush of something that sweeps through Tim’s body like adrenaline. It reminds him of the surge of euphoria that Danny had tried to describe to him during his cold-water swimming phase – it’s like he’s been injected with something, just a pure physical joy that fires through his ever synapse.

“Oh,” Martin says, off somewhere distant where sound still has meaning. “Tim, sorry, you startled me–”

Tim kisses him, pushing into it hard, has Martin halfway down before he seems to adjust enough to realise what’s happening. He breaks the kiss, frowning, but the expression isn’t so jagged as to be a refusal – Tim’s first impression is one of confusion, but his eyes don’t linger there.

“You’re in a good mood,” Martin says, sounds almost suspicious of it, and usually Tim would take mock-offence at that, demand to know what’s so wrong about that. But there’s a list long enough, and he’s already too mellow.

“Mmm,” he says, and kisses him again, this time managing to push him all the way down with it. He starts to let his hands wander, and when his mouth finds that unbroken patch of skin on his throat again, Martin gives up on trying to say anything.

Only afterwards, lying slotted together and breathing through the last traces of another surge of pleasure, does Tim find himself wondering what that first one had been. He’s never felt anything quite like it before – it had swept him up and carried him off, and he needs to know how to find it again.

He tries comparing it to the relief that he’d felt when Martin had come back, that first night, but they’re not even close cousins. There’s nothing in the sequence of events to explain it – he’d seen Martin, he’d gone to him, it had felt good, and they’d had sex.

That isn’t accurate. It loses the nuance, skips over things, he realises, a slow dread starting to gather like a storm in the pit of his stomach. He’d seen Martin – he’d startled him. More than that – he’d _scared_ him. It had felt good.

Tim closes his eyes for a moment, shuffles around so that his back is pressed to Martin’s. Wishes he could be wrong, but the euphoria had started and finished in the instant that Martin had been afraid, a sudden sharp blast that had drowned out any ability to reason or question. He’d felt Martin’s fear like seeing a new colour for the first time.

Martin, who’s lying next to him, sleeping. Who trusts him. Tim can feel the warmth of his skin against his back, the shape of his spine. Too close.

He feels sick, sits up, staring out into the half-dark of the room. Then he stands, and starts to gather his clothes again. He trips, halfway through his trousers, his foot knocking into something on the floor – it goes skittering off wildly, and he lets out a soft curse. Goes still, sure for a second that he’s woken Martin, but there’s no change in his breathing, still steady and slow.

Tim crouches, and reaches for the thing. He knows what it is as soon as he touches it, feels the shape of it, the grooves between the buttons, and it’s all he can do not to yank his hand back like it’s been burned. A tape recorder.

Poetry again, Tim decides, wildly. He won’t press play and be disproved, won’t hear Martin reading a statement or find that he’s been listening to any. He picks it up, and sets it carefully down on the box next to the photo album.

He stands there for a short while, still and staring at Martin’s sleeping form, while his brain rattles through desperate straw-clutching explanations. Just imagining things, he tries to tell himself, he was pleased to see Martin and he’d been rattled enough by Helen’s visit to blow it all out of proportion.

It doesn’t help as much as he’d hoped. He’s been imagining a lot of things, lately.

“Tim?” Martin asks, his voice hazy with sleep, and Tim starts, nearly knocks the box and everything on it onto the floor. “What are you doing? Come back to bed.” He reaches out a hand, and though it doesn’t even come close to him, Tim lets it pull him back.

It’s colder where he had been lying than it should be, and he doesn’t move away when Martin tugs him in closer. Martin doesn’t say anything else, just settles more comfortably against him, and then closes his eyes again. Back to sleep, without any idea that anything is wrong.

Tim can’t join him. He lies there, still wide awake, picking over what had happened, dissecting it all, and he still can’t find another way to explain it. He doesn’t sleep. By the end of the night, he’d have marched back into the Theatre Royal willingly.


	12. Chapter 12

The knock at Jon’s door is the most welcome thing he’s heard that week. The statements haven’t been working again, his mind unable to grasp at woodworm-riddled chests or false lights or old ornate weapons. He needs a distraction like air.

Basira, he hopes, with a new threat to chase down, or a fresh lead, and then they’ll be off to talk to Helen, and on the other side of the world from all of the things that make him feel like his ribs are starting to rot. Maybe Daisy, though it’s not the day when they usually listen to The Archers together, and it’s nowhere near the right time. Perhaps Melanie, something useful in the statements.

“Come in!” he calls.

The person who pushes through into his office isn’t any of the ones who possibly could have helped: it’s Tim. He looks terrible, his eyes staring past Jon for a long moment before they focus on him. He just stands there over the threshold. There’s no Martin behind him, ushering him, just an empty, late-night Institute.

“Tim,” Jon says, slowly, as that decaying sensation starts to thread through the rest of his skeleton. He opens his mouth to ask what he can do for him, if he can help with anything, what he wants, but every version of it dries up on his tongue. “Um.”

“I know we’ve not been…” Tim gestures vaguely into the air, as if in an attempt to encompass all the things that they aren’t. It’s inadequate. “But I – I really need to talk to someone.”

Jon hesitates. Tim’s voice is flat, almost empty – he sounds like he hasn’t slept in days. He should help. He has to help, even if that dull sensation in his bones just wants to forget all about him and Martin, but he can’t. He looks at Tim, and there’s another flash of that kiss in his head, needle sharp.

Eventually, he gestures towards the empty chair, and Tim finally comes inside. He closes the door behind him, sits, and then stares at Jon for a while, no longer any challenge in his face.

“I…” he pauses, sighs out a long breath of air. “Look. The stuff I’m about to tell you – don’t tell anyone else, okay? Especially not Martin.”

“That depends what–”

“_Please_, boss.”

“Fine.” Jon says, shortly. He knows that was a manipulation. Can’t picture the future in which he hadn’t fallen for it.

“I…” Tim shifts a little closer to the desk, leaning down on top of the statements. He lowers his voice. “I got this… weird feeling, a few days ago. When I was with Martin.”

Oh. Jon glances down at one of the files, struggles to burn the reference number on it into his brain, instead of looking anywhere else. He feels like he’s just swallowed something without properly chewing it. Tim’s going to ask for relationship advice. From _him_. He’s going to _tell him_. Jon will have to pretend to be pleased for them, like he should be, but it’s gone midnight and he doesn’t think he can manage it.

“I startled him,” Tim goes on, staring down at his hands as he knots his fingers into one another. “I _scared_ him. And it – it felt amazing. And I don’t know what to do.”

Jon jerks his head back up, surprised himself. Whatever he had been expecting, it hadn’t been this. There’s a rush of relief through his throat, and he swallows it, angry, because this isn’t _better_.

“It felt good that you scared him?” Jon checks, keeping his voice carefully neutral. Just establishing the facts.

“Yeah,” Tim says, and his sentences ache. “Not like – not like… I don’t know. It wasn’t a normal feeling. I don’t feel like that when I scare people. But I did, and it was _him_, and I’m terrified I’m going to... do _something_ just to feel like that again. I can’t do that to him, Jon. I thought… I thought that everything was fine, that I was still me, that I’d finally got some luck out of this fucking universe, but, what if I didn’t come back right? What if whatever I am now, it’s something that’s going to hurt people?”

He stops, and the silence stretches for far too long, reaches breaking point in Jon’s consciousness.

“Everyone says that you’re trying,” Tim whispers, his eyes red, blinks held too long. “Not to be a monster. Not to be something that hurts people. I don’t want to be that either. Especially not to Martin. So, what am I supposed to do, boss? Help me try too.”

Jon wants to reach for him. He could, so easily, lay one of his hands on top of Tim’s. Try to comfort him, the warmth of contact, understanding. He can’t. Tim might take it badly, and besides, he wants Jon’s help, his perspective as a monster, not his touch. Like with Basira, Jon has to be what’s needed of him.

“If it means anything,” he says anyway, keeping it soft, trying not to disturb too much of the air. “I think you _are_ the same Tim who I knew before.” This discussion has done more to convince him of that than everything else, but he won’t say that. “That doesn’t have to change.”

He lets himself try to see, for just a moment, with something beyond his own eyes – Tim’s as afraid as he says he is, can’t sleep with it. He’s been lying awake every night ever since it had happened, next to Martin but unable to join him in unconsciousness, can barely walk in a straight line.

“It’s Martin, in particular, that you’ve felt this around?” Jon tries. He feels like he’s trying to navigate a maze blindfolded, and he hates it. He shouldn’t be fumbling about with this – Tim needs his _help_.

“Yes,” Tim says. “I don’t know if it would happen around anyone else. The only other person who’s really around me a lot is Daisy, and I’m not sure where I’d even start trying to make her scared of me. She isn’t like she is before, but she still feels… unshakeable?”

“Well…” Jon hesitates, gropes towards an answer, swills the words around in his mouth before he lets them out. “If it’s Martin you’re worried about being around, maybe you should try being around Martin less?”

It feels like a betrayal as soon as he’s said it. Like it’s something he’s come up with selfishly, because he doesn’t like how it feels knowing that Tim and Martin are together. Like he’s trying to split them up, breaking something instead of helping repair it. But his lungs try to cramp at the idea – he doesn’t want _that_, either.

He hadn’t been thinking about their relationship, he tries to tell himself, but he’s sceptical – he’s hardly done anything _but_ think about it since he’d found out.

“Right,” Tim says, still staring down through Jon’s desk. “Avoiding Martin.”

He doesn’t sound pleased with it. Jon doesn’t blame him – they’d been so _happy_, in that second. It must be a lot to give up. But if Tim’s scared of hurting Martin, he pushes, trying to get it through his own head, let alone Tim’s, then it’s better for him to be in situations where he physically cannot hurt Martin.

“Thanks,” Tim says, tonelessly, and then he stands abruptly, nearly knocking the chair over, and leaves the room without another word.

It’s the first real conversation they’ve had since Tim had come back that hadn’t ended in shouting, Jon realises. He wishes that he could think it was progress, be pleased with it. Instead, all he can do is hope that he’s not made everything worse.

* * *

Tim takes the long route back to the safe room. He doesn’t need to – Helen’s door hasn’t been in that wall for a while now; Daisy says it’s usually in the tunnels. But he wants the time to try to work through what Jon had said.

_Try being around Martin less_. It’s an obvious solution, and one that Tim hadn’t quite been able to articulate himself. He doesn’t _want_ to do it. He wants to ignore everything that Jon had said, remind himself that Jon is a monster, exactly what he’s trying to avoid being, and that he hadn’t been good at advice even when he had been human.

But Jon, right now, is a monster who isn’t hurting anyone. And if he doesn’t have a choice about his biology, if Martin had already made that choice with the Leitner and his thoughtlessness, then he has to take the lessons for the latter where he can get them.

Humans, after all, don’t feel like _that_ when they scare the people they’re sleeping with. No matter how far he tries to fling the thought from his head, he can’t just pretend it never happened – he’s been trying that for days, and it isn’t working. No matter how much he tells himself that he’d only had that intense euphoria once, that it didn’t mean anything, he knows what he felt, knows it wasn’t _normal_.

Martin’s gone by the time he gets back, but the sheets have been pulled neat and straight, so Tim decides that it’s not the sort of absence that he needs to worry about.

He doesn’t know if he’s still going to be there when Martin gets back. He wants to be – lately, Martin’s face softens when he sees him. Relaxes, some of the lines and tension smoothing out. Like he feels safe. It makes his throat swell, and he doesn’t want to give it up. Doesn’t have a choice, if Martin _isn’t_ safe.

Trying to sort through the rest of his head, he starts to try tidying the safe room again – starts by moving the photo album so that it’s parallel to the edge of its box, the tape recorder long gone and unasked about, and then moves onto the rest of the room.

The fly is a speck of dark black, lying on the floor just under the shadow of the bed, legs crooked. It’s larger than the others had been, shimmers almost purple where the light hits it. The sort that’s loud, buzzing, probably the very one that had bothered him before Helen’s door had turned up – it _had_ vanished rather abruptly. He crouches, checking for others, wondering if it’s worth fetching the dustpan and brush again.

“Tim?”

Martin’s voice is soft, worried – Tim knows he’s concerned. He’s noticed, of course, that Tim hasn’t been sleeping. Even if he had been half as observant as he is, they haven’t shared the dreams of the Theatre Royal for days. Awful as they are, they’re the established normal.

It doesn’t, a small, sulking corner of Tim’s brain whispers, feel good _now_. Martin’s upset, and afraid, and he doesn’t feel anything except worse, so that probably means that he can just ignore Jon and keep going like he wants to. It wouldn’t, though. Martin’s afraid _for_ him, not _of_ him. If he wants to feel that again, he’ll have to do something to cause it. And it would be so _easy_. There’s a penknife in Martin’s desk drawer in the Archives.

Tim gives his head a firm shake, trying to clear it, and stands, turning to see Martin, heading back into the safe room. He’s carrying two mugs, even though it’s the middle of the night. Must have thought Tim would need it. Not that far off, Tim supposes – going wandering at gone twelve isn’t exactly the behaviour of someone who couldn’t do with a cup of tea.

“Martin,” he manages, briskly. Doesn’t move to take the mug, so Martin puts it down carefully next to the album. Half of Tim wants to protest, and the rest reminds him that even scalding tea probably wouldn’t be able to do it any damage.

“What were you looking at?” Martin asks. He starts to come over, and Tim’s thoughts twist at the idea of his proximity – he wants to recoil, not risk him coming close enough to hurt, wants to lean into him, kiss him. There might be a part of him that wants to consider Martin like a cat does a trapped mouse, but he squashes it down so hard he can’t tell if it’s there in the first place.

“Another fly,” Tim says, pointing, diverting Martin away from him. “Just the one. But I thought you said the ecosystem has spiders for a reason.”

Martin shrugs. He takes a tissue from his pocket, and crouches down, picks the fly up in it. Tim steps out of his way as he makes for the bin, tucks it in around the bag – not for paper recycling, Tim supposes – then lifts the whole thing up, and carries it to the door, pulling it open again. If he feels Tim’s scrutiny, is uncomfortable with it, he doesn’t show it.

There’s no reason, Tim supposes, that this should feel any different to him from all the other ways that Tim had looked at him since he’d come back. It’s not like Martin can pull the thoughts out of his head like Jon can, but doesn’t.

He sits carefully on the edge of the bed, as Martin’s footsteps fade up the corridor. He tries to think about the fly, instead of Martin. Buzzing around, making a general nuisance of itself, and then not. Just a moment between the two – perhaps something to do with Helen’s door, sending some sort of shockwave out through the air. He wonders if it had been afraid – if it had enough of a concept of its own death to understand what was happening. If it had felt it at all. Died in the air and fallen, like the starlings in the daydream that he struggles not to remember, or if it had known every millimetre of that plummet, its wings suddenly no longer capable of their purpose. If it had understood that. If it had died there on the floor, trying to crawl away, or to take one last flight.

Tim pushes himself back to his feet, and starts to pace again, disturbed in his quiet by his own thoughts. The fly had just died, as flies do when they can’t find their way out.

There’s a flash, in his head, of Martin holding the tiny corpse in the tissue, the sheen of its exoskeleton glinting like a jewel, and the image makes his skin crawl.

By the time that Martin gets back, he’s got his coat on and is slotting his phone into his pocket. He’d hoped to already be gone, but he supposes he’s all out of luck, lately.

“What are you doing?” Martin asks. He’s confused. Worried. It’s the middle of the night. Going out probably isn’t the best idea, but Tim doesn’t have anything else.

“Out,” he says. “Fresh air.”

“Oh.” Martin blinks, and Tim can see him trying to calculate if it’s worth an argument. “If you wait a minute, I’ll get my coat–”

“I need some time alone,” Tim says. It's stilted, forced, and he can see that it catches Martin like a thorn. He's trying to keep his expression neutral, but it isn't quite working. Tim's been studying his face – he can see the way that his steadiness is starting to go around the edges.

“Oh,” he says again. “Okay. Um–”

“I'm going now,” Tim says. He steps around Martin, and then keeps going, past and out the door. He ignores Martin when he calls after, asking him to text him if he needs anything, to let him know he’s safe, all of it. Doing it turns his stomach.

“This had better work,” he mutters, but Jon isn't there to hear him.


	13. Chapter 13

Tim finds Daisy in a quieter corner of the Archives. She’s sitting, listening to something through earphones and reading through a statement file. Glances up at him as he arrives, and offers him a half-smile, before she returns to her work. If she thinks that there’s anything odd about him seeking her out, rather than the other way around, she doesn’t show it.

“Mind if I join you?” Tim asks, an unconscious echo of every time she’s put the question to him, and she gestures to an empty seat opposite. He takes it, close enough to be together but not so near as to intrude.

It’s a temporary work station – Daisy must have brought the chairs herself, looks like it might be an on-going project of hers. One she normally has help with, judging by the number of piles of files there are.

He’s brought his own work with him, though – one of the reference books, so that he can try to convince away the jabs of guilt through his chest that come with every declined call or ignored text from Martin, because he’s at least doing something constructive with his time.

As constructive as knowledge of the saltmarsh could possibly be, anyway. He has no idea if it actually relates to anything that they’re up against, save for that small chapter on spiders, and if Daisy has any information about it, she doesn’t volunteer it. Maybe it doesn’t have to do with anything, and he’s just supposed to be learning as much as he can, building up a wealth of information that he’ll be able to draw upon if a situation it applies to ever comes around.

He’s still not sure of the point of it, when Jon can just know whatever he wants to, whenever he wants to.

Maybe he’ll try asking the others, sometime. See if he can find out exactly how they’re supposed to be spending their days – Jon doesn’t seem to request any statement follow-up anymore, asking to help Martin with his emails and spreadsheets isn’t an option now, and Basira plays her cards so close to her chest that no one else can catch a glimpse of them – which he supposes is the best way to play, with the stakes they have.

Tim opens the book to his last page, and a black and white illustration of a shrew stares up at him through small dark eyes without catchlights, sharp teeth bared.

There’s a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye, and it’s easy to be distracted. Daisy, leaning down and pulling another file from her box. She barely even seems to glance over it before she’s dropping it onto the stack beside her, apparently containing nothing she’s looking for.

“What are you up to?” he asks.

She pauses, in the middle of leaning down to retrieve a new one. Removes an earphone, but she doesn’t ask him to repeat the question – probably has the volume quite low anyway, not quite ready to cut off any awareness of her surroundings, but still trying to make them bearable.

“I’m looking through the records of police requesting statements,” she says. “These ones are all supposed to have been photocopied and sent, but the place is still a mess. Section 31 people tend not to be chatty about it, but we’ll be able to tell from this what they thought was worth pursuing. Could give us an indication of what might still be out and about.”

“Need any help?” It sounds more helpful, after all, than what he’d been doing.

“Thanks.” Daisy pauses, and then reaches for another document, one that’s sitting on the temporary desk in front of her, carefully separated from anything else. “I’ve got a list of the requests from the early 2000s, but I’ve been having trouble finding most of them – Melanie said she’d keep an eye out, but she’s only brought back a couple so far. You’ve been here longer, worked here before…”

Before they’d realised that it wasn’t really an archiving job. Tim nods, goes to reach for the paper, but there’s a sudden noise from behind him, and he tenses, expecting to hear Martin’s voice, to have to make himself scarce. It’s only been a couple of days, and he’s already running out of excuses. On the occasions when they do meet, Martin has started to look at him with a slightly wounded expression that cuts Tim right down to the bone. He’s clearly starting to lose sleep again, too, startles at every little unexpected noise, though Tim’s been able to make sure none of them are coming from him anymore.

He hates having to stay away from him, hates it so much that the feeling seems to be trying to burn a hole in his chest. Comes so close to just dismissing the whole plan, but he has nothing else.

“Hey,” Daisy says, taking her other earphone out, and starting to wrap the wires around.

“Hi.” Basira’s voice, rather than Martin’s – Tim relaxes into his chair, and turns the page of his book. He has no objections to continuing looking at it until Daisy can explain the rest of her plan. The shrew is dead, now – the next illustration is of a carefully separated and arranged skeleton.

“What’s up?” Daisy asks, and though it sounds as mild and relaxed as normal, he thinks he can pick out a slight nervous edge to it.

“Nothing,” Basira says, and her voice has the tone of a sigh, but she doesn’t let one out. “Still no signs that any of them are planning anything – still things hanging around outside, but if I go towards them they move away.”

“And still no sign of Lukas?”

“No,” Basira says. “I tried asking Martin about him again, but he’s just as evasive as usual. I told Jon to talk to him, but he always makes some excuse not to.” She glances over at Tim, still wary, but at least now he knows she had good reason to be. _Someone_ needs to be wary of him. As wary as he is of himself. “Speaking of Martin, he’s looking for you.”

“Oh,” Tim says – he pulls his phone from his pocket, but there are no fresh texts. Though that doesn’t include all the times that Martin had typed something out and not sent it. He gives a quick scroll back through a one-sided screen – Martin asking if he wants anything, if he’s okay – and swallows a sour taste in his mouth.

“Well, he asked if I’d seen you,” Basira clarifies.

Tim cranes around, glancing back towards the main part of the Archives, but there are no shapes heading down towards them. Of course, Basira wouldn’t have known yet to tell him. He shakes his head, and turns back. He can feel Daisy’s eyes on him as he does so, sharp.

Rather than look up at her, invite whatever question she’s considering, he looks back down into the book, and starts to leaf through it again. The pages seem looser than they should – one of them just falls away from the spine as he tries to turn it. He tucks it back in, and tries to keep going, but what had seemed heavy and sold is now too fragile for even that.

The paper starts to crumble against his hands, folding in against itself at his touch. Faintly aware of Daisy and Basira still talking, he swallows the noise trying to break out of his throat, and stares as the book starts to trickle through his fingers. It falls as a fine powder onto the floorboards below, illustrations withering away to nothing before his eyes.

It’s all gone within a matter of seconds. He closes his eyes, hard, swallows, and tries to remind himself that books don’t do that.

When he opens them again, it’s still resting in his lap, open to the picture of the shrew, whole and safe. It doesn’t make him feel any better.

* * *

Tim doesn’t bother knocking. He just walks straight into Jon’s office, gives only the time it takes for him to try turning the door handle the wrong way as a warning. Jon opens his mouth to protest, but Tim looks even worse than he did last time – his face is hollow, and he seems to just sway into the office chair, rather than sit in it with any sort of intention.

“It’s not working,” he says, not even really at Jon – his head is inclined towards a point somewhere on the desk between them, eyes dull.

Jon gives it a long second, waiting for him to go on. He doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t even blink.

“It’s not working?” he prompts, stressing the inflection as much as he can. Still trying to be careful around him, not to force him to open his mouth and give it all to him as a statement.

“Avoiding Martin,” Tim clarifies, and his voice falters over the name, struggling through it. “I’m trying, but… he finds me, or he asks the others if they’ve seen me, and I can hardly tell them, yeah, don’t tell him, I think I might be a monster and I’m scared I’m going to eat his fear.”

_Did you break up with him?_

Jon swallows the question before he can ask it. He’s not supposed to know, it’s not his business. And it’s not as if having an answer in either direction is going to stop his thoughts from swarming around them like a cloud of malcontent bees, buzzing and droning through every impulse.

“You’ve had more of the… odd feelings?” he tries, instead.

“No.” Tim’s almost growling now, like he doesn’t think that’s the point. “Not so far. But I keep… thinking about it? And I can’t take the risk. So I’ve been trying not to be around him.”

“But he finds you,” Jon concludes, unable to help a spike in his tone. It hadn’t been so long ago that Martin had asked him to stop finding him, and he had done it, no matter how it had made him feel. Martin should have given Tim the same consideration when he’d asked – _if_ he’d asked, he reminds himself. He doesn’t know what passes between them, has no idea if Tim’s said anything at all, or if he’s just leaving Martin in the dark.

“Yeah.” Tim finally lifts his head a little way, fixes Jon with something that looks like it’s supposed to be a baleful glare, but can’t quite manage it. “You and him have this whole… thing. Can’t you talk to him?”

Jon shifts in his seat, abruptly uncomfortable, and runs his finger along the edge of his desk drawer. He has his own rib in there. The ashes of the second monster that had tried to kill him. He shouldn’t be so perturbed by the prospect of talking to _Martin_, who likes dogs and jigsaws and everyone getting enough to eat.

“And I should tell him…?”

“I don’t know.” Tim waves a hand, clearly frustrated, not thinking properly. “To give me space, or something? I think he’s worried. Daisy says he was asking her if I seemed okay. Of course he’s worried, I haven’t told him anything, I just started acting really weird for no apparent reason. _I’d_ be worried. But maybe if you told him…” He trails off, and there’s a minute of wretched, uncertain silence, that wraps itself through Jon’s head like vines.

“I’ve been giving Martin some space myself,” Jon admits, and he catches Tim’s surprised glance, even when he’s trying to focus most of his attention on the desk. “For… not entirely dissimilar reasons.”

“You’ve felt _that_ too?” Tim’s eyes start to narrow, and Jon can feel what he’s about to say, even without using his abilities – more important information, kept to himself, stuff that could have _helped_.

“No,” he says, hurrying through the word. “Not quite – I’ve never really felt anything quite like what you describe. It’s more… you know I have a lot of difficulty not following up on things that… that I know are there. Like the person with the statement, in the café.”

“Yes,” Tim says, slowly, but he’s back to guarded, rather than openly hostile. “But it’s _Martin_, what could he possibly–”

“Martin came back from his work with Peter with a lot of… secrets,” Jon explains. He feels the gap of time between them like a physical space, isn’t sure how he can bridge it just with words. “Things he doesn’t want to talk about. I’m afraid if I’m around him, I’ll make him talk about them, and then…”

“He won’t want to be around you anymore?” Tim suggests. It doesn’t sound quite right, to Jon – it’s more than that, more than just caring whether or not Martin wants to be with him, but now he’s confronted with it, denying it would feel like a lie.

“I don’t want,” he says, slowly, choosing the words carefully. “To be the thing that takes his free will away like that.”

“You don’t want to be a monster to him either,” Tim says, quietly. There doesn’t seem to be any anger left in him, all of it replaced by a flash of understanding so clear that Jon wants to cringe away from it. “So… you can’t help me.”

Jon frowns – he doesn’t like the edge of despair in Tim’s voice, or what he says. That impulse to reach for him again pushes back through his head, hovering at his synapses, but Tim’s not even leaning on the desk, this time – too far off, even if he had known how to do it.

“I didn’t say that,” he says. “I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to make him understand what’s going on–”

“I don’t _want_ him to understand what’s going on,” Tim interjects, somehow slumping even further in his seat, like a crumpling tin can.

“I don’t know that I’ll be able to give him enough to stop him trying to find you,” Jon clarifies.

“Right.” Tim stares down into the floor through dark-ringed eyes, his voice flat and toneless. “Fine. I guess I’ll just…” He wavers out, clearly has nothing else.

“I’ll try,” Jon finishes. “I’ll try to talk to him. If nothing else I can probably distract him for a few minutes.”

“Right,” Tim says again, with no change to the inflection. “Thanks.”

“Tim…” Jon says, hesitates – he’s about to push at a boundary, and Tim could push back _hard_. It’s hard to feel like that wouldn’t be better than this, though. “I’d like to ask where you’ve been sleeping?”

“Safe room,” Tim says, still with no change in his manner. “Or, not really. I try to get there before Martin does and lock him out, but I’m spending the whole day away from there to avoid him, and he’s usually in there by the time I get back.” His eyes are still unfocussed – Jon catches himself wondering whether he’s been letting Martin assume that he’s been sleeping around, with a twinge of hurt in his chest at the idea.

“If you need somewhere,” he says, slowly, testing each syllable before he says it, with no idea how Tim will take it. “I have a new flat I’ve not been getting much use out of.”

For a while, Tim doesn’t seem to have heard, and then he wrenches his head up to stare at him in a series of uncomfortable, half-aborted motions, like a beginner’s attempt at puppetry.

“What?” he echoes.

“My flat,” Jon repeats. “I’m never there. I don’t mind you being there.” He digs into his pocket, and drops the key on the desk in front of it. It still has the address attached to it on a bright yellow plastic tag that he hasn’t got around to removing yet. He’s barely used it since the estate agent had handed it to him.

Tim studies it for a time, like he’s trying to make sure it isn’t trapped or imaginary, and then he reaches out. Taps his index finger against it, just making sure, and then he picks it up.


	14. Chapter 14

Tim doesn’t go to Jon’s flat, that night. He considers it – turns the idea over in his head, and it doesn’t seem too bad. Nothing there that he’s afraid to hurt, and from what Jon had said, probably more like a hotel room than anything else. Empty shelves and bin and fridge. Nothing to relate it to Jon but the pervading sense of absence.

A part of him is sure that he shouldn’t be using it anyway. It’s still Jon’s. And he hates Jon. He’s _supposed_ to hate Jon – when he reaches for the feeling now, there’s nothing there so easily identified, no burning conviction of wrongdoing. Just a wide dark space, and a sliver of what feels like recognition. Jon is his mirror in sleeplessness and fear, a companion in misery.

When he pictures Jon’s flat, it has Jon in it. Neither of them knows how to live with the other, and they struggle through the time in a haze of carefully measured bathroom time and poor takeaway compromises. It won’t be like that, he knows – Jon had said he doesn’t use it. He won’t be there.

It gets dark, before he decides what to do, and then it’s a choice between trying to put up with the night tube, testing his luck on the streets after dark, and staying in the Institute. It’s not difficult to pick the latter – he’s not in the mood for whatever the good drunken people of the capital have to offer, and last time he’d been out past dusk, he’d felt like his every step was being watched, more so even than in the Institute.

There are things lurking out there, he knows, probably waiting for anything that smells like the Institute to make enough of a mistake to swallow them whole, and he’s already been lucky once.

Finding somewhere to spend the night in the Institute, though, still isn’t easy. He walks past the safe room without pausing – doesn’t need to look inside. He hears it, when Martin draws in a breath to call out to him, and then lets it out again. Already starting to give up. Knows that Tim’s avoiding him. Hurts with it.

Tim keeps going, though his gait turns a little unsteady. It hurts him, too. He somehow misses Martin like he would half his ribs. Whatever he finds in the Institute to lie in, uncomfortably scrunched into a chair or lying on his back on some floorboards somewhere, it’s a poor substitute for being next to Martin, the warmth of his skin, the faint smell of apple shampoo. He misses being quiet and comfortable with someone, and the way that Martin looks at him, like he knows Tim’s who he always has been, how he listens when Tim talks.

And he still hates the decision, hates that it had been done to him without his consent, but he misses being around someone who had wanted him back so badly that they’d used a Leitner.

He comes across Melanie, next – she’s sitting on a camp bed that’s been set up beside the entrance to the tunnels, and he supposes that he remembers seeing it there before, folded away and leant up against one of the walls. She has her feet firmly planted on the floor, and a large knife not far from her hand, though the point is slightly tangled in the blankets. There’s a statement open in her lap, but her eyes are on the trapdoor, watching it like she thinks it’s about to snap open.

It takes a minute, but eventually she jerks her head up towards him. Frowns at him, with a cousin of the same guarded expression Basira uses.

“Sorry,” he says, immediately. “Didn’t mean to disturb you, I’ll go and– and…” He doesn’t know what to do, can’t even come up with a convincing lie. Sounds pathetic, he knows, but his head’s stalled and he can’t find the gear to make it go again.

“If you’re not going to get at me about the monsters again, you can stay,” Melanie says. She leans over, pulls the knife free of the blankets, and sets it down on her other side. Making room for him.

He hesitates, but there are no better offers that he can go with, so he heads inside. Sits down, gingerly, next to her, and relaxes when he finds no other weaponry hidden in the bedding. Melanie’s back to watching the trapdoor again, with a concentration that he’d have thought once wasn’t possible at this time of night.

“Do you do this every night?” he asks.

“No,” Melanie says. “Normally, Basira does it. But she’s out tonight. She didn’t say where.”

“Oh,” Tim says. He follows her gaze, and pictures the sprawl of the tunnels beneath. He should shudder. The worms had found him here, the thing that hadn’t been Sasha had pulled them out of him. He’s too tired. “Did Daisy–”

“Daisy is keeping Jon company at the moment,” Melanie says. “She doesn’t really like being alone, at the moment, and she doesn’t find…” She gestures at the trapdoor. “_This_, particularly calming.”

“Do you?”

Melanie shrugs.

“I feel calmer if I know someone’s keeping an eye on it,” she says. “The lock still works, but I’m not sure how much of what’s out there that would actually be a deterrent to.”

Tim nods, and lets the conversation lapse into silence. The trapdoor doesn’t move, and eventually Melanie hands him a file – it’s a statement, though not one he’s seen before. Clearly a copy of some old letter or other, and his eyes ache trying to follow the handwriting. He doesn’t mind giving it a go – they aren’t recording them, and he doesn’t want to feed any more of himself to anything, especially not now. There’s no tape recorder in sight, and Tim’s got good at noticing them, poking out from under the corners of papers or sitting innocuously on shelves. There are always a few sitting in Jon’s office, and on the desks in the Archives, though he hasn’t seen the one that Martin had been using in the safe room since that night.

He leaves them alone. Doesn’t want to interact. Maybe Melanie doesn’t, either – wants the information, the advantage, but she had hated this place like he had, once. He remembers how deeply she’d loathed it, from the few, bristling conversations that they had had before the House of Wax.

The statement is a little too dense to decipher. The loops of the writing arc through his brain, and he has to follow them all the way, before he can understand what the word is supposed to be, but they go on and on and on. It doesn’t take long for his head to start to slump.

Melanie doesn’t prod him awake again, doesn’t let out some sharp word, but he is vaguely aware of it, when she reaches out to pull the statement from his hands. He doesn’t protest – he’s far too out of it for that.

He just lets himself drift, and opens his eyes again in the Theatre Royal, sits in that stone seat with his arms folded over his chest. Maybe, he thinks, one of these nights, Martin’s hand will stop waiting for his. Those empty fingers make his chest hurt.

* * *

It had been easy to keep the idea of talking to Martin for Tim vague and far-off, right up until Jon walks out of his office to find him sitting at his old desk. Even then, there’s a part of him that’s sure he could get away with it – Martin hasn’t seen him. He’s staring through his laptop screen, head resting in one of his hands, while the other pokes at the touchpad. Jon could walk away, retreat back into his office, and no one would ever be any the wiser.

Except him. He’d know. And that would be enough.

He circles around, and as he does so, he recognises the familiar layout of the Institute’s email interface, displaying more unread messages than Jon has seen in his own inbox in a year. He hardly ever gets anything that isn’t an automated response from other departments that he’s fired requisition requests off to – no one wants to talk to him, no one wants to associate with the Archives at all. They may not know exactly what’s going on, but they know there’s something, and it’s enough to make them give Jon a wide berth, even digitally.

He starts to lean forward, to try to get a better look at the subject lines, so he can tell what’s made Martin’s inbox different, then remembers that he’s not supposed to be spying on Martin, something like shame clouding his head.

“Martin,” he says, as loudly and clearly as he can without leaving his normal vocal range, and takes a full step back.

Martin starts so violently that he nearly knocks over a cold cup of tea in an effort to pull the screen of his laptop down.

“Jon,” he says, already scrambling to his feet, pulling the computer into his arms with a scrape of rubber feet against the desktop – it catches on a piece of paper, and almost rips it clean in two. “Sorry, I’ll go–”

“I wanted to talk to you, actually,” Jon says. He tries to pretend that he doesn’t see a flicker of what could be panic or impatience or _anything_ in Martin’s face. Makes it easier to not want to pull it out of his head. “It’s… about Tim.”

Martin hesitates, glancing at his tea as though he’s trying to work out if it’s worth taking it with him when he flees.

“I told you,” he says. “He’s Tim. I’m sure – I _know_, okay? I just do.”

Jon pauses, and Martin seizes that half second to make a beeline for the way out, almost moving faster than Jon had known he could, abandoning the mug.

“Martin!” he calls, and Martin stops, reluctantly, still reaching out a hand towards the door out into the rest of the Institute, away from everything that should be under Jon’s purview. He waits for a moment, shoulders tense, and then slowly turns back, when it becomes clear that Jon isn’t going to say anything else until he’s facing the right way. He doesn’t meet Jon’s eyes, his free hand fidgeting – he clearly wants to be somewhere else, Jon notices, with another twist through his gut.

“It’s not that,” Jon says. “I – I believe you. I do. He does seem to be the real Tim.”

“That’s because he _is_ the real Tim,” Martin says, and it’s barely shy of resentful. “It worked, Jon, and it’s fine. If you could all stop looking at him like he’s about to grow another head–”

“You don’t look fine,” Jon says. “And neither does he.” It’s the truth – Martin’s starting to look as bad as he does, the sleeve he picks at unravelling past his wrist.

Martin sighs, his shoulders rounding with the exhalation. The fight going out of him, far more easily than Jon had expected or wanted. Martin’s stubborn, has had years of practice keeping things close to his chest – it should take more than this.

“He’s avoiding me,” he says. “I don’t know why, but he won’t talk to me so that I can just find out what I did, and–”

“You think it’s something _you_ did?” Jon interjects, and he can’t keep that slight pressure out of it, the almost-incredulity.

Martin blinks at him, confused and exhausted.

“What else could it be?” he asks. “He said he wasn’t angry with me anymore about the Leitner, but maybe he found out something else about it, and–”

“Martin,” Jon says, cuts him off. He picks the rest of his words out more slowly, keeping it as careful as possible. “Tim – he’s been through a lot. For him, the Unknowing wasn’t that long ago. It makes sense that he needs a bit of time to adjust. Give him some space. I… expect he’ll be back to his old self–” Jon winces at that, has no idea which of Tim’s old selves he means – he doesn’t expect Tim as they’d known him when they’d first come to the Archives, before they had lost Sasha, before their lives had become an endless cycle of monsters and rituals and death. “Soon enough. But it wasn’t anything you did.”

Martin’s eyes are sharp for a moment, and Jon wonders if he can see straight through the haze of uncertainty around everything he’s just said, straight into the conversation that he’d had with Tim, if he had heard the clink of Jon’s key in Tim’s pocket, and somehow known what it meant.

“I just…” Martin hesitates, and it seems to last for minutes. Like he’s picking through everything in his head, pulling out only the tiniest of pieces that he wants Jon to know. “I just miss him.”

“I’m sure he misses you too,” Jon says, and struggles to keep the sour note out of his voice. This isn’t the time to let on about any of that, not before he’s worked out what it means. He doesn’t think that he manages, exactly, but there’s no trace on Martin’s face to suggest that he’d heard anything of it, his thoughts elsewhere.

He doesn’t know what he’ll do, if Martin queries it. He’ll probably lose that precarious control, and just let everything out from the moment that he’d seen them together. Include the fact that he’d been the one who’d advised Tim to stay away from him in the first place, just to make sure that he breaks it all irreparably enough.

“I’d better let you get on,” Martin says, abruptly, and before Jon can switch gears enough to work out how to get him to stay, he’s gone, leaving the door to the Archives swinging shut behind him, the empty breeze of it pushing at Jon’s face.

He had tried, he tells himself. His mouth still tastes bitter, even though he’d kept his promise to Tim. Martin doesn’t want to be around him. Doesn’t miss him. That much is clear, and he supposes that he shouldn’t expect anything different. Martin knows what he is, and what he does.

There’s a small, vicious part of Jon that wants to tell Martin everything that Tim had said, make him understand that there’s something not right there either, that they’re not that different. But he quashes it, hard, and turns back to his office.

It’s easier just to lock himself away in there, and pretend that he can forget everything that happens outside it.


	15. Chapter 15

Tim had never really thought he’d end up using that interest in architecture for this. It had been an appreciation of art, at first, soured when Smirke had become a facet of the thing that had taken Danny. Now it’s a constant way to calculate escape routes.

He had done it before, when he’d needed to come and go without having anyone see him. Without letting himself see Martin and Melanie and especially not Jon. It had taken him a while, to figure out a path through the tunnels, but they had stopped shifting. Sometimes, his skin had still crawled and his scars still itched with the memory of Prentiss’ attack, or his chest burst with that same desperate, trapped-bird feeling that he’d had watching Martin climb down into the dark before the corridors. But the Unknowing had crawled closer like that twisted contortion of Grimaldi he sees in his dreams, and everything else had started to fade away, replaced with the single-minded pursuit of the Circus.

There’s nothing like that for him now. Nothing to make it easier to go the ways he needs to. Just that familiar, twisting guilt running through his insides, because when he hears Martin’s voice from the Archives, he has to turn and walk away from it. It would be easier, he’s sure, to just go to him. Apologise, kiss and make up, worry about not hurting him later.

He goes anyway, and he keeps walking until there’s a noise from behind him that’s so loud and so close, it’s almost the crack of a gunshot. He freezes, then forces himself to turn, the movement as unnatural as if he’s on strings.

Just Daisy, holding a book up at the same height as his head and shaking the sting out of her fingers from where she’s slapped it.

“I _said_,” she says, with enough force that he knows this isn’t the first thing she’d tried to get his attention. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” Tim tells her. He should have come up with some sort of answer, a lie that he can make into a reality, but he’s heading the wrong way for the trapdoor and the outside world, and in that second he forgets every place in the Archives.

“You look like someone’s just murdered your dog,” she says, taking a step closer, lowering the book. “You’ve all been like that lately – you, Martin, Jon. What’s up with the lot of you?”

Tim blinks, fighting the urge to move back.

“I don’t know what makes you think–”

“Don’t fob me off, Stoker,” Daisy snaps. “I’m a detective. Don’t bother lying.”

Tim sighs, and reaches for one anyway. There still isn’t one waiting. He opens his mouth, hopes one will obligingly come spilling out, all the same. It wouldn’t be the first time.

“I’m trying to avoid Martin,” he says, instead.

“All right,” Daisy says, though her tone implies that she doesn’t believe it is for a second. “Why are you doing that? I thought things were going well with the two of you.”

“I came back wrong,” Tim says, flat and simple. He’s too tired to try to find another way around it. “I thought I hadn’t, but people who aren’t wrong don’t feel good when people are scared of them.”

“And you just decided that not being around Martin was the best solution?”

Tim shrugs, Daisy’s question prickling uncomfortably at him, a flush rising into his skin.

“It was Jon’s idea,” he says, with a shrug that’s more nonchalant than he feels.

Daisy’s eyebrows quirk, but she doesn’t comment on that. Instead, she stands for a moment, thinking, and then gestures him down the corridor.

“Come with me,” she says, and he can tell from her tone that he doesn’t have a choice in the matter. When she starts walking, he trails along in her wake, with nowhere else to go, only faltering when she reaches the stairs up out of the Archives.

“I can’t go up there,” he says, and Daisy stops, on the third step, glancing back towards him, her eyes narrowing. “Dead, remember?”

“We’re going to Artefact Storage,” Daisy says, the admission unusually taut, like a shift back towards who she had been before the Unknowing. “I doubt you’re the first ghost they’ll have seen. Come on.”

Tim holds his breath for as much of the journey as he can manage, his mind pushing him to turn and go back for every second that Daisy spends not looking at him, but he knows she’d find him, even if it wouldn’t be with that full operational discretion she’d been free with once. Once they reach Artefact Storage, she holds the door open for him, to make sure he comes through.

There’s no option but to follow her. He recognises the woman at the desk, but only hazily – he hadn’t paid too much attention to the other staff, at the end of it, and she clearly hadn’t paid Tim any either – she glances up, but her eyes skip over Tim in a way that he would have been offended by, once.

“Hi,” Daisy says, leaning her forearms on the edge of the counter.

“Here for the usual?” the assistant says, already digging for something, where they can’t see.

“Yeah,” Daisy says - she holds out a hand, and closes her fist around the key she drops into it. “Thanks.”

She heads off to the left, towards where Tim vaguely remembers the table with the web design had once been, before Jon had smashed it to kindling. She isn’t walking quite so smoothly anymore, steps a little too staccato, her empty hand pressed flat against her leg.

Tim follows. He can feel the assistant’s eyes on him as he passes, notices the frown that says she’s trying to but can’t quite place him, and he assumes from the way that there’s no cry of alarm echoing down the corridor, that she doesn’t manage it.

Daisy takes a deep breath, unlocks the door, still holding it, and then steps inside.

It takes a second for the light to turn on, motion-activated, and even then it’s dingy, energy efficient. As the bulb warms up, Tim goes to join Daisy, who’s standing, a little too straight, her whole body facing the artefact.

It’s a large wooden coffin, tightly wrapped in dull chains. The phrase _DO NOT OPEN_ has been clawed deep into the lid.

He recognises it, he realises. Only the vaguest of flickers – one of the first statements that Jon had had to use the tape recorder for, the guy whose building had been empty. It had been there, too, at the Unknowing, a single point where the ways that the world went wrong hadn’t quite seemed able to touch. Too much something else to be affected.

“After the Unknowing,” Daisy tells him, her voice too quiet now, starting to break. “I was in there.”

Tim follows her stare back to the coffin, and tries to think back. He can’t remember. Not really. There had been blood and music and no part of him had been how it should.

“The Hunt lost me,” she goes on. “I couldn’t move. I couldn’t chase. There was just being crushed. For years. I didn’t want to be what I was anymore, when I came out. It cut me off from everything that made me a monster.”

Tim hesitates, glances back at her, but if she hadn’t still been talking to him, he would assume that she has no idea he’s there.

“Are you suggesting that I should...?”

“God, no.” She tries to wrench her attention towards him, but though her face turns, her eyes are still stuck on the coffin, like she’s trying to ingrain those scratches in her head. “Jon had to come in and get me out. We could both have died. And that was months ago. Sometimes, you’re going to come back different. Jon and I both did. Better, for me. I don’t know about him, but he still cares. He’s trying, now. I’m trying.” Daisy hesitates, takes a long moment to try to put her thoughts together, and Tim doesn’t interrupt. “You’re not going to keep yourself human by cutting yourself off from what you don’t want to hurt. You’ve got to make the choice to not be that thing, and you’ve got to make it a lot. It’s easier to do that when you’ve got what you care about there. Hiding from Martin isn’t going to fix everything. You’ve not defused anything, you’re just trying to get him out of the blast radius.” She manages a cautious glance in his direction, and tucks her arms around her middle – her hands are shaking.

“Would you kill me?” Tim asks, the question falling onto his tongue too easily. “If I…”

“No,” Daisy says, and he can see from her face that her psyche’s being dragged back towards the coffin again. She’s terrified of it, Tim realises, the understanding settling cold in his chest. “Basira would do it. Or Jon, or Melanie. I’d help if I could. But if you don’t want to hurt him? Don’t.”

“That easy?” Tim says, and he can’t help the irreverent edge to his tone.

“That hard,” Daisy corrects. She takes a step backwards, away from the coffin, and starts to reach for the door handle behind her, without looking away from it. “But you’re not a monster yet, and you don’t have to be.”

* * *

The lights are out, when Tim gets back to the safe room. It’s starting to get late, but even as illogical as it is, he has to push away a rush of fear through his chest, something small in his brain curling around the idea that Martin might have gone, gone and won’t come back.

He steps inside, as quietly as he can, and though it’s as dark as it ever gets in there, he can see Martin, lying on the bed, half-curled away from the door. Tim closes it with a gentle click, and moves as softly as he can, not wanting to wake him. There’s a tape recorder on the box again, he notices, with a flash of irritation that he has no right to feel – he hadn’t been there, after all.

Careful to leave as much of a gap between them as he can, he tries to settle onto the bed next to him. As he tries to arrange his limbs, he realises that Martin isn’t actually asleep. He’s not sure what, exactly, it is that tips him off – if Martin’s a little too tense, his breathing not quite right – or if it’s just that he’s been around Martin sleeping long enough to know when he isn’t.

Safe in the knowledge that he’s not going to disturb him, Tim leans in, and very gently kisses the back of his neck. Martin flinches, and that euphoria ignites in Tim’s veins, bright and burning. He shoves it down, as hard as he can, refuses to feel it.

“Hey,” he says, keeping his voice steady. “Sorry, I–”

The taut line of Martin’s shoulders relaxes at the sound of his voice, and he can hear a held breath being let out.

“Tim,” Martin says, hazy with what Tim thinks is relief. “I thought you were– Tim?”

“I know I’ve not been around much,” Tim says, leaning to rest his face in the crook of Martin’s neck, and waiting every moment of it for Martin to jerk away. “I know I’ve been… rather shit, lately. I’m sorry.” He gets a moment like that, breathing Martin in, before he starts trying to shuffle around to face him.

He doesn’t look as angry as Tim had thought he would. The lines of his features are weary, a hollow echo of what Tim had felt in his bones since he’d been brought back.

“No,” Martin says. “It’s fine. Don’t worry.”

Tim stares at him for a beat, waiting for his brain to process what he’s just said.

“It’s not fine,” he says, flatly. “Don’t tell me that it is, Martin – you look awful, and I–”

“If you needed space you could have–”

“It wasn’t that.” Tim raises his voice, like he’s trying to cut off both of them, shaking his head. “I… There are a couple of things I haven’t told you about. I’m starting to think that I didn’t come back as right as I thought I did.”

“No,” Martin says, a little too vehement. “You’re still you, I mean–”

“For the moment,” Tim says. “Maybe I am. But I’ve been… seeing things. Weird stuff. When I’m awake. And when I startled you just now? When you were afraid of me?”

“I wasn’t afraid of _you_,” Martin starts, but Tim gestures for him to let him finish, and he lapses into a vaguely mutinous quiet.

“You were afraid, and it happened to be of me, and that felt good.” He’s sure it should be easier to explain, by now – he’s told Jon about it, told Daisy, and that should have counted as practice. It should just trip off his tongue now, rehearsed and simple. Instead, it’s even more raw than the first time he’d tried to go over it. “And that’s something that happens to monsters. So… I figured I’d just be around you less.” There’s no need for Martin to know that it had been Jon’s idea. He’d be either pleased that they’d talked, or upset, and Tim doesn’t want to take the risk of the latter. “I’m sorry. I should have told you.” He hesitates, not sure of how to explain what Daisy had said – that it’s easier to stay human if he’s around what keeps him that way. He can’t put that on Martin. Can’t give him that responsibility, when all he’d agreed to was sex.

“Yeah, you should’ve,” Martin says, with a sigh, before he can figure out how to articulate anything. “But you’re here now.”

Tim frowns. That shouldn’t make up for it. It shouldn’t be that easy – he’d seen Martin’s face the first few times that he’d excused himself. He’d hurt him, he’d seen that, he’d kept doing it. It’s not _supposed_ to be like this now.

“Aren’t you going to be upset with me?”

“What good would that do?” Martin reaches for him, and Tim feels the lightest of touches on his arm. “I want you here.”

Tim hesitates, but it’s far too effortless to let himself be drawn into a kiss. It’s not right – Martin should be upset, should be passive-aggressive, should be doing all the things that Martin does when he’s not happy, anything except letting Tim treat him like a doormat. Instead, he just seems tired, content. Means the kiss as much as he has any of the others.

He doesn’t push it any further, though. Just brushes his thumb over Tim’s cheekbone, and then rests back against the pillow, letting his eyes slide shut. Tim moves a little closer, wrangles an arm around Martin’s shoulders, and pulls him in so that his head is resting on Tim’s shoulder instead. He lets Tim rearrange him, with only the occasional shift to make it a little more comfortable.

His breathing eases out quickly, a stark contrast to how it had sounded when Tim had walked in on him, and he’s asleep well before Tim. He doesn’t close his eyes, doesn’t want to drift off immediately. Not when he can spend a few minutes enjoying being back, before he has to go and take his place in the Theatre Royal.

It’s peaceful, there. He’d been so sure that it wouldn’t be. That Martin wouldn’t have wanted to be around him, that the second he’d had that feeling again it would have carried him off, reaching for more of it, trying to close his fists around it and keep it forever.

Instead, it had been almost peripheral.

He cranes his neck to press a kiss to the top of Martin’s head, and then relaxes again. Shovels the growing warmth in his skin over the troubled pit in his stomach. He doesn’t have to do this on his own. If it goes wrong, it’ll be dealt with.

There’ll be no more creeping around the Institute. No more walking along the riverside with his hands stuffed deep into his pockets, glaring at every couple he passes. It may not be the most comfortable bed he’s ever been in, Martin not the most skilled person he’s ever had sex with, but for the moment, it feels right.

He watches the ceiling, and it doesn’t start to crumble away before him, leaving the Institute open to the sky, the building decaying and tumbling. It won’t. He’s not going to keep his eyes open through anything like that. He won’t look at it, not anymore.

With a last glow before he closes his eyes, he thinks of that flat key, returned to Jon unused. No longer any need for a last resort.


	16. Chapter 16

Jon has no way of knowing if the dread coiling in his stomach is something that comes from him or the Eye. Sometimes, it’s easy to tell – he’ll have had no way of knowing something, but will anyway, or his train of thought will suddenly find itself on newly-laid tracks. This time, it’s just a feeling, even after he walks into his office.

The key to his flat has been left on his desk, a quick scribbled note underneath it in Tim’s handwriting, that just says _thanks_.

He stops, stares at it for a long moment, and the dread shifts a little into a gnawing trepidation. He thinks what he can in an attempt to clear it – Tim has probably just got a better offer, which could probably be literally any offer at all. There’s no reason for him to feel the way that he does – Tim had clearly left it under his own power, there’s nothing to suggest otherwise – but it won’t pass.

Jon turns around and starts away again. He’ll find Tim, check on him, make sure that he’s all right. Prove the sensation unfounded.

It worsens with every step he takes towards the safe room. He gives a quiet knock when he gets there, then opens the door. It isn’t locked – there’s a twist of something in his gut at that, because Martin should be making sure he’s secure, even if he is hoping for Tim to come back. He doesn’t open it far – only enough to catch sight of them.

Tim and Martin, lying on the bed together. Slotted in against each other like they’d been designed to fit just so. Martin’s head rests against Tim’s shoulder, and Tim’s is inclined slightly over it. The knock hadn’t been enough to wake them.

Jon closes the door again, his gut turning. Another intimate, private moment that hadn’t been for him to see.

He tells himself that he hadn’t meant to. That he hadn’t expected to look in and find them like that. He’s not _spying_. He’d just wanted to check with Tim about the key – hadn’t even thought that he’d be _there_, just that Martin might have had a better idea of where to find him than he did. He has no intention of sticking around to watch them. Doesn’t want to be aware of what they’re getting up to.

He turns away, and starts to head back to the Archives proper. At least he has his answer, he supposes. Tim won’t be needing the key after all. If he wants to go anywhere outside the Institute, it’ll probably end up being Martin’s flat.

At least, he supposes, neither of them will be commuting by themselves. But he’s back in that place of trying to convince himself that he should be happy for them, trying to smother something in his core that doesn’t feel quite like resentment.

He still can’t manage it. The feeling is sour and spitting, declaring that if they hadn’t wanted to be seen they shouldn’t be lying there mid-morning with the door unlocked. That Tim shouldn’t be doing that, risking that.

The latter, at least, just feels like anger for its own ends. He doubts that the Tim he’d spoken to in his office would have gone anywhere near Martin if he’d thought there was even the slightest possibility that he’d lose control, that he’d hurt him.

Maybe it had just passed. Maybe he’d found another way of dealing with it. Maybe Jon can ask him what that is. He could do with some better methods himself.

In any case, whatever it is that makes him feel like he’s about to cough up acid is his own problem, and he needs to get it gone before they get up, in case he encounters one of them.

Jon turns back to his office, and then stops. He doesn’t want to go back in there. Sit and do nothing constructive, unable to move his thoughts away from Tim and Martin, wishing that his mind would find meaning for himself as easily as the statements tend to – a guiding light to a realisation about the Corruption or the Flesh, any of them. Something similar for him, that could help him understand exactly what his problem is and how to make it go away.

He wanders back into the maze of filing cabinets that has become his tether. Reaches out a hand, to brush it along the fronts of the drawers, waiting for something to call to him.

He’s sections away and almost giving up when it happens – a sharp jolt that sparks up his arm and stops him in his tracks. It’s not how he normally feels pulled towards one statement or another, isn’t wandering the Archives with his eyes closed, waiting to see where he ends up. He’s been _stopped_.

The cabinet is locked. He makes a note of the number, and goes back to his office, rummaging through his desk for his box of keys. It must be one of the ones that they hadn’t started organising yet, Prentiss coming crawling out of the woodwork before they could make enough of a dent in the Sisyphean task of correcting Gertrude’s filing system, or intentional lack thereof. He’d long opened all the ones that they’d made a start on, and never seen fit to close them again.

The key comes into his hand easily, and he doesn’t have to check the number to know that he has the right one, though he does anyway.

It opens the second drawer down with a hiss of old runners, and he gives the files inside a quick glance. They’re odd shapes, clearly from a number of different years, the paper standards changing, some yellowed with age. He runs his hand along the top, feels a paper cut that’ll heal before he can find it, the skin smoothing over in a fraction of a second. Then he stops, digs his fingers in, and pulls it out.

The Institute’s crest stares out at him from the front of the file, the owl’s disapproving gaze, the insistent _vigilo-opperior-audio_. The number, printed starkly underneath, is 9991307. Inside, the top of the form confirms it, in a cramped yet neat hand. _Statement of Victoria Manning_.

_Regarding the death of her brother-in-law_, Jon fills in, on his own, and doesn’t wonder how.

There’s a note indicating that the statement had been accompanied by a photo album, which Ms Manning had entrusted to Institute, and claimed could raise the dead.

It’s an effort not to read through it there and then, to tell it all to the recorder, but Jon flips the file closed again. Tim and Martin need to see it, too. His brain catches on the idea of finding them together, of feeling their reconciliation like gravel in his chest. But this is too important to wait, he tells himself.

He turns away from the filing cabinet, and nearly walks straight into the woman from the pub he’d been to with Melanie and Daisy. She’s standing almost directly behind him, and smiles that same smile.

“Hello, Archivist,” she says.

* * *

It’s a sunny sort of feeling. Tim hasn’t felt it in a long time, but he remembers it well enough – the blush of the first few days of a relationship, where every little thing is enough to make him smile. It doesn’t fit quite right, here – what he has with Martin can only just be called friends with benefits, isn’t meaningful or romantic – so he expects that it’s still three quarters relief. He’s been forgiven, he’s finally slept in a way that seems to have shifted the exhaustion, he hasn’t woken to find Martin hollowed out next to him, in the last stages of decay.

He doesn’t mind it there. Had thought he’d never feel it again. After all, he’d left anything that might be called a proper relationship behind when he’d learned what the Institute was, realised the inevitable hole he was going to leave in anyone that he tried to make a life with.

It’s not terrible, to have been wrong about that. He leans down, kisses Martin’s forehead, and grins when his eyes crack open with a small noise of protest.

“Morning,” he says, and it’s impossible to keep the lightness from his voice.

Martin groans, tries to roll away from him, and nearly falls off the bed. Tim catches his arm, guides him back to safety, and then shoves the covers back. Martin grabs after them, a little too slow.

“It’s nearly eleven,” Tim tells him, doing his best to straighten out the clothes that he’d slept in. Both of them are still fully dressed, and he wonders, idly, if there’s time for them to get a little less so.

Martin casts a resentful eye at the clock, and then reaches for the mug on the bedside box, frowning when he finds it empty.

“Tea?” Tim suggests. He’s familiar enough with Martin’s mornings to know that that’s an important step.

Martin nods, and lets himself be guided to his feet. He leans into it, when Tim kisses him briefly, before they have to leave the room and can’t do it anymore. It’s nothing drastic, barely more than a press of lips, but it feels like it falls into place, in Tim’s head. He’s missed that. Doesn’t have to anymore.

Once they’re outside, Martin heads through the Archives with the single-minded determination of a zombie, and Tim is content to follow after him. He settles against a desk as Martin begins his familiar rituals, clipping the lid of the kettle against the tap when he goes to fill it.

“I could do with a coffee,” he says, when Martin glances briefly back at him, and gestures at the mugs on the draining board. He doesn’t reply, just moves to accommodate him, adding in the motions alongside those of his tea.

Tim watches the way his hands move, and concentrates on that and only that, letting his mind wander to how they’d feel against his skin. He stays there, for a while, thinking fondly of a possible future that evening, until Martin lets out a shocked, high-pitched sound that drags him back to reality as hard as a whistle blast.

Martin has turned away from the sink, holding two mugs, one of which is Tim’s old one, the other generic, branded with the Institute’s crest, but he’s not moving anymore. Just standing there, staring at something somewhere past Tim.

Tim turns, and it feels like the movement opens some sort of fissure in his chest, yawning and dangerous. He knows even before he’s seen that it’s not going to be Daisy or Jon or any of the other Archives staff – even if Martin thought that someone had caught them, realised that he and Tim are sleeping together, it doesn’t warrant that sort of pallid, white-knuckled reaction.

It’s a man. He’s slightly taller than Martin, long-limbed and straight-backed. He moves closer to them with the sort of grace that Tim most associates with wild animals, and he offers Tim a wide smile as he draws nearer.

“Hello,” he says, the word clipped and with a firm, almost upper-class accent.

Tim pushes away from the desk, and moves to stand more completely between Martin and the stranger. Something niggles at his head as he does so, a vague familiarity that he can’t shake, but he manages a polite, unfelt smile in return.

“Hello,” he says. “I’m afraid this area is out of bounds, so I’m going to have to ask you to leave. If you go back the way you came, you should find your way back to the public areas.”

“Tim,” Martin says, voice faint. “Get away from him.”

“Just helping him understand that he’s lost,” Tim says. Behind him, he hears the clink of ceramics as Martin puts the mugs back down on the draining board, and then Martin’s close, hissing something into his ear.

“He’s one of the other people from the album.”

Tim’s lung capacity seems to shrink, a sudden frost collecting in his bloodstream. He lets his eyes flick back towards the man, who’s stopped now, a couple of metres away, standing with his hands clasped behind his back, with that same expression on his face. Maintaining the smile for far too long, without even a twitch at the corner of his mouth.

His photo, Tim remembers, is around twenty pages back from his, an old black and white print where the shades blur together in places. He looks exactly as he does in it, like he hasn’t aged. The only difference is that the military uniform has been replaced by a shirt and trousers, not quite formal, but not completely casual, either, like he’s dressed for a meeting at a company he owns.

It had had scorch marks in the page around it, a blackened border around an unmarred photograph.

“If you want to give a statement,” Tim tries. “You’ll need to talk to the Archivist.” He reaches a hand into his pocket and pulls out his phone, hoping that’ll be enough to tell Martin to do the same. It’s a difficult process, but he types out a message to Daisy as best he can without looking away from the man, and hits send. _MONSTER_, it reads, _AT KETTLE_. There’s no immediate response, no buzz of a reply or an attempt to phone, and Martin hasn’t moved behind him. The void in his chest only seems to deepen.

“Oh, I’m not really very interested in talking to him,” the man says. He holds out a hand towards Tim, like he expects him to take it, shake it. Tim doesn’t. Doesn’t even drop his eyes towards it for more than the second it takes to work out that he’s not holding a weapon. “You, though – you, we’re all very excited to meet.”


	17. Chapter 17

Jon takes a full step back. His mind uses the time, as well as it can – he remembers her, his thoughts guided by the weight of the statement in his hands. She’s one of the people from the photo album, the last one in there before Tim. She’d been dressed in jeans and a denim jacket there, her picture dated. Nothing like the business attire she seems to favour now, her blazer and skirt immaculately pinstriped.

Her photograph had been one of the ones with tear marks around it – they’d looked like they had healed themselves, a gossamer thread of thin paper where the rip would have been. There’s a mark across her throat, bunched white scar tissue, that follows the lines of the damage, corresponding to what must have been an attempt to destroy the image and her new life. The page had been slotted irregularly against the spine, like someone had tried to pull it out, but it had refused to come free even at a firm tug.

There had been no name on the photo. Just a timestamp in the upper right corner that marked it out as being from the year 1998.

“Who are you?” Jon demands, letting the compulsion snap out into his voice, until it sounds more like his own than it has for weeks.

The woman considers him for a little while longer, and then turns, starting to walk back towards the centre of the Archives, her heels clicking against the floorboards.

“Don’t bother, Archivist,” she says, speaking away from him, and leaving him with the choice of following after her or being left behind. He can’t pick the latter, something in his skull pulling him into motion even at the slightest consideration. He barely has time to put the statement back down on top of the cabinet – assuming there’s a later for him, there will be a later for it, too. If he takes it with him, he runs the risk of it being destroyed by the very things that it might be able to help him against.

It had cost her no visible effort to refuse the compulsion, he notices, his stomach shifting uncomfortably. For all the effect it had had on her, it might as well have been the brush of a moth’s wing – maybe that was how it had been for Tim, too. Maybe he’d been lying through his teeth the whole time that he’d been back.

He pushes the thought away with a doomed attempt at finality. This woman has been what she is for almost a decade. Plenty of time to grow stronger, develop a resistance to creatures of the other powers. Tim has only just got back, and Jon knows him, has seen that it’s him with his own eyes, even if he can’t with the Beholding’s.

She’s moving more slowly, now, enough for him to catch up – she’s sure he’s following. Probably exactly what she’d wanted, predicted, the alternative believing that the Archivist would choose not to know.

As he goes after her, he notices a flash of movement, ahead and to the side, around one of the other filing cabinets. Melanie, holding that knife of hers like she thinks she’s going to be able to make a difference with it. She meets his eye, and he can see her questioning glance. He shakes his head. Even if she had still had that bullet inside her, he has no idea if these things can even be killed yet. She ducks out of sight again, and he swallows a sigh of relief.

“Why are you here?” he tries again, instead, and the woman lets out a soft, polite laugh, the sound almost diplomatic.

“I knew you’d be curious,” she says. “But really. You’ve already established that that doesn’t work. We’ll tell when we’re ready. If we’re ready.”

Jon glowers at her back, with nothing more substantial to offer.

“Hey!”

He whips his head around at the sound of Daisy’s voice, his pulse rising at the idea that she’s about to try what he’d signalled for Melanie not to, get herself hurt trying to attack. But she’s moving in the same direction he is, and there’s a young man – from the eighth page back from Tim’s, Jon’s mind informs him – with a hold on her arm. It doesn’t look like it’s too tight, and he expects that even not as strong as she used to be, she could break it if she wanted to.

But Daisy knows monsters when she sees them. He doesn’t expect the grip is anything more than a symbolic representation of the captivity they’re both in. The woman might as well have grabbed him, too, for all that he can change direction.

“Daisy,” Jon says, moving to fall into step beside her. He glances at the man, considers a challenge, but he ignores him, and he knows it would be a waste of breath. “Did you manage to warn any of the others?” he asks, instead.

“No,” she says. “I got a text alert, but he got there before I had a chance to look at it. Basira’s out, I think.”

Jon curses, and quickens his pace. The woman’s leaving them behind, no longer feeling the need to linger now Jon has another guide, and he rushes to keep her in sight. He rounds the corner into the main part of the Archives, and falters.

There are more of them. They’re standing in a half-circle, blocking Tim and Martin in against the wall. Tim is standing between them and Martin, one arm across his chest and the other down by his side, palm angled back towards Martin as though trying to keep him away from the danger. He doesn’t look at Jon and Daisy as they’re pushed through to join them, the monsters parting just long enough.

His expression is unreadable, and he doesn’t return Jon’s glance – he’s too focussed on one of the monsters, who stands there, a little in front of the others, hand outstretched like he’s waiting for a greeting.

“Well,” Tim says, stonily, and there’s an utter refusal in his voice to do anything of the kind. “I don’t want anything to do with you, so if you could kindly fuck off.”

The man sighs. He lowers his hand, and casts an almost disappointed glance over Jon and Daisy.

“Is that all of them?” he asks.

“All that we found,” the woman says, and there’s something like vague interest in her voice, twinned with contempt. “The Archivist and a broken hunter.”

“Hm,” the man says, and then his attention is back on Tim, sharp and assessing. “Interesting company you’ve been keeping. Not what you should have.”

“I’ll make my own decisions, thanks,” Tim says, and his voice is dripping with so much corrosive hatred that Jon finds himself realising, with a startled twitch of his mind, that Tim hasn’t spoken to him quite like that in a while.

Jon meets Martin’s eyes, just for long enough to confirm that Tim and Martin already know as much about the situation as he does – Martin nods in response to his questioning glance, and there’s recognition in his face when he looks at the monsters, a couple more of them drifting into the group from elsewhere in the Archives. There’s a faint stirring of disquiet, somewhere at the back of his mind – Martin hadn’t wanted to look over the album as much as he and Tim had. If he’s remembering these people from it, the decision couldn’t have been as impulsive as he’d let them believe.

There’s no time to worry about that now.

“I think,” Jon says, turning back towards the monsters, and moving to Tim’s side. He laces the words with compulsion, for all the good it’ll do. A feeble thing, even here in his place of power. “That you had better explain yourselves.”

* * *

The man waits a long few seconds before he opens his mouth again. Tim presumes that it’s just enough time for Jon to know that his spooky interrogation techniques aren’t working, because it’s apparently impossible for two different monsters to be in the same place without having a pissing contest.

“Well,” he says, eventually. “What can be the harm? My name is David Wells, and my companions and I share a similar set of circumstances – namely, we were killed, and brought back by the photograph album that I believe you must have in your possession.”

“What do you want with it?” Tim demands, suspicion prickling through his head. The album’s still sitting in the safe room, undisturbed next to the bed, and he tries to push the knowledge as far out of his brain as he can, unwilling to give it up.

Wells blinks at him, his expression almost disappointment.

“Nothing at all,” he says. “Though it would be nice if it could find its way out of your Artefact Storage before too long. It does do its best work out in the world, after all. Even if it does still manage to find people grieving enough to do what they shouldn’t, you’re the first we’ve had in almost ten years. Our interest is in you. Would you mind telling me your name?”

“I would, actually,” Tim says. They won’t have anything of him, not his name nor his cooperation nor his life.

“We felt it, when the album was used again,” Wells goes on, clearly untroubled by Tim’s hostility. “We are all… connected, to the End and to each other. We knew it when you found your way back into the world, and we were waiting for you to join us. That is the way of it – we feed the one who returns us to our new master, and then we find each other. But you… did not come.”

“No,” Tim says, as burning as he can make it. “And I’m not going to. I said. I don’t want anything to do with you.”

“So, of course, we all wondered what was wrong,” Wells says. “When we came looking, and realised that you were in the Institute, we thought perhaps that they had found you and were stopping you coming to us. We… reached out. So that you would know we were coming.”

“You…” Tim’s voice trails off. He remembers the book, falling apart at his touch. The starlings. Martin, bleeding out in his arms. The exhaustion. The sounds of something else, sitting next to him in the Theatre Royal’s dark. “You did that to me.” The anger bubbles up into his voice, already blistering in his stomach.

“We watched,” Wells says. “And we looked for you, but you still didn’t come, so we thought perhaps we should come and get you, and, here we are. It wasn’t so easy to sense you here, but sometimes it can be good to learn things the old-fashioned way.” He smirks a little, turning the expression on Jon. “Wouldn’t you say, Archivist?”

In Tim’s peripheral vision, Jon’s face has gone stark and cold, an inhuman edge there that he hasn’t seen since he’d been compelling the truth of Tim’s resurrection from Martin. It chills him less, now that it’s turned on an enemy.

“It seems,” Wells continues, when Jon doesn’t rise to it. “That being around the Eye has _interfered_, with your true nature. Has let your human connections fester.” He stretches out a hand again, and Tim’s skin starts to crawl. He wants to step forward, reach out as if to take it, and then snap the fingers back as hard as he can, see if the crack of bone gets through to him where cursing hasn’t. “But this is not where you are supposed to be. Come with us.”

“Not interested,” Tim repeats, though the words are harder to articulate now. “Leave me alone. I don’t want to join your cult, and I don’t want whatever your freaky mind powers are. Get out.”

Wells sighs, and glances over at the other monsters like he’s waiting for a pantomime audience’s reaction. They stand and wait, their expressions flat and unmoving. Not exactly, Tim thinks, savagely, making the lifestyle look appealing.

“We were concerned about this,” he says. He takes a step forwards, towards Tim, and there’s so much fury, flickering strobe-like through his brain, that it doesn’t even occur to him to move back. Neither does Jon, and he doubts that Daisy’s intimidated, though he can feel Martin flinching at his back.

“Yeah,” Tim says. “Well, be concerned no longer. Fuck off. It’s very simple.”

Wells gives him a cool glance, raises an eyebrow, and there’s a snapping noise from somewhere behind him. Tim wheels around, just in time to see Daisy’s legs go out from under her. She crashes down, her hands claws, scratching so hard at the floorboards that her fingernails leave grooves. She’s pale, her face a rictus, jaw at an angle that has to be painful.

Tim takes a step towards her, his throat constricting, then glares back at Wells.

“What are you doing?” he demands, violent but not enough to release the pressure building in his head. “Stop it. Let her go.”

“Interesting,” Wells says. He doesn’t even seem to be paying Daisy any attention, though she lets out a cough so raw that Tim’s lungs seem to narrow in sympathy. “I had started to wonder if you were capable of any reactions beyond unhelpfulness.” His gaze flicks sideways, and Martin starts choking.

Tim lunges for him, manages to catch him on his way down, but Martin isn’t supporting any of his own weight, so all he can really do is slow both their descents. He ends up on his knees, one hand resting against Martin’s face – his skin’s gone cold, and where his eyes meet Tim’s, the wild panic in them is already starting to dim around the edges.

“Martin?” He can’t keep the horror out of his voice, his thoughts flickering back to the last time, recoiling. “Martin!”

He glances up, staring towards Jon in mute appeal for his help, but Jon’s attention is flickering between Daisy and Martin and Wells, that resolute expression long gone, swamped. He doesn’t move, though Tim needs him to go to Daisy, to help her.

“Stop it!” Tim shouts, so loudly that his chest burns with it. The sound doesn’t seem to cross the distance as it should, like Wells is too far away now. To Tim’s eyes, there’s a faint blurring of the air between him and the other monsters, and Martin and Daisy, that final proof that they’re the ones doing it. “You’ve made your fucking point, just let them go!”

Wells doesn’t. He just keeps watching, smiling at Tim as he had when he’d first walked into the Archives. His hand is still outstretched, like he thinks Tim would ever take it now.

Tim curses and looks back down into Martin’s face, rubs his thumb over his cheekbone, trying to draw his attention.

“Martin,” he says, tries to force something firm out of his voice. He’s rewarded with a flit of Martin’s eyes towards him – he can still hear him, isn’t gone yet. “Just, hold on, okay?”

Daisy, barely a metre away, drags in a hoarse, near-impossible breath, and Tim’s grip on Martin tightens. He gestures with his head for Jon to go to her, try to hold her in this world as much as he is Martin, but Jon isn’t looking at him. He’s turning slowly back towards Wells, starting to advance on him.


	18. Chapter 18

It goes quiet, inside Jon’s head. He can hear, somewhere else, Tim screaming at the top of his lungs, so loud that it might eventually bring blood up in his breath. He’s cursing, swearing that he’ll never do anything Wells wants if he hurts Martin or Daisy, but Wells isn’t listening, or doesn’t care, assumes that Tim will come and join him anyway, eventually.

Jon steps into the space between Wells and Tim, cutting off the monster’s line of sight to Martin. From Tim’s continued snarling, it doesn’t seem to achieve anything. But Jon can feel what they’re doing, like a slight breeze against his skin, trying to raise the hairs on the back of his neck.

“Why don’t you try that on me?” Jon asks, his voice low, carrying.

“I could,” Wells says, one eyebrow quirking. “But I think we both know that it would be a waste of my time.”

Jon stares at him for an instant, full in his face, and starts to push at the door in his head, encouraging the water to start to seep in at the edges. He wants Wells’ history, all their histories, something to make them break. The past opens up to him like a flower in bloom, and he starts to pluck at the petals.

“Do you want to know what happened to your sweetheart, from before you went to war?” he asks Wells, head already aching from the effort. He doesn’t shy away from it – keeps pushing. There’s no other choice.

“I imagine that she died,” Wells says, almost absently. “It was an awfully long time ago. I don’t miss her, Archivist. Your friend won’t miss his either.”

“Tuberculosis,” Jon snaps, tries to make the word a blade. He wishes for a moment that he could do what Elias can, push how she’d wasted into Wells’ mind, make him know only that. Make him stop, even if it’s just for long enough for Tim to get the others out. He glances over at the assembled monsters, and picks out the woman from the bar – April Manning, whose sister had tried to undo her. “Your pet, the rabbit your parents told you ran away.” She had loved it, cried for weeks, violently loathed the young cat her father had bought her afterwards.

“Fox got her,” Manning says, the slight edge of a smile crossing her face. “Archivist – we know. They’re dead and gone and that is what we are.”

Jon turns his stare back on Wells, his own expression starting to tip towards a shade of the desperation that he can hear in Tim’s voice, in his now half-whispered pleas to Martin and Daisy. It’s not working – _nothing_ is working, nothing _will_ work. It wouldn’t – there is simply no knowledge that the Eye can level at the End that it would care to be surprised by. The End has seen it all before.

He takes another pace forwards, brings himself into range, and hits Wells as hard as he can in the face. The blow’s more powerful than anything he could usually manage, splits his knuckles, leaves them stinging for the second that it takes them to heal. It snaps Wells’ head to the side, and behind him, he hears Martin and Daisy drawing in a breath, almost lost in the sound of Tim’s faint sob.

Rather than look away from Wells, Jon opens up his senses, lets himself _know_ what’s happening there. Daisy is trying to make it over to Tim on aching, weak limbs, pushing herself to focus solely on her goal, refusing to let even the smallest consideration of what had just happened to her into her brain. Tim is cradling Martin against his chest, his thoughts a tumbling nonsense that he had checked Martin’s throat and found it whole, that it hadn’t been real, that they shouldn’t have ended up here anyway. Martin still hurts, but it’s duller now, and he holds himself in by the place where he’s managed to tangle his fingers into Tim’s shirt.

Wells straightens up, and Jon tenses, ready to snap out another blow, for it all to start all over again. But instead, everything stays still, and he can hear Daisy starting to sit up.

“I’m surprised at you, Archivist,” he says, though is voice doesn’t betray it. “I’d heard you weren’t quite as physical as your predecessor, and that’s a little more… hands-on, than I was expecting. Your position has a reputation, after all.”

“Get out of my Archives,” Jon growls, his other hand finding the lighter in his pocket. Someone had tried to burn Wells before – the parson of his church, holding the album over a candle, hoping himself safe on consecrated ground – but perhaps the monster would catch where the book had refused. If he won’t be _seen_, perhaps there are other ways to remove him.

“We don’t have what we came for,” Wells says, smoothly. He’s not intimidated. He gestures, and the rest of the monsters take a step forwards, closing the circle, their faces sharp-edged and hungry.

“You’re going to be disappointed,” Jon says, doesn’t bother to lie through a condolence. “It’s not happening. Tim is staying right here, and you–”

“I’ll go with you.” Tim’s voice is low and hollow and defeated. The words take a moment to sink in, and then Jon rounds on him. He’s still holding onto Martin, his knuckles blanched from the pressure of his grip, head inclined. “I can’t make myself a monster for you, but I’ll leave the Institute. Don’t hurt them anymore.”

“Tim,” Jon says, far more gently than he’d intended, shaking his head. “No. You’re not going anywhere.”

Tim tries to glare at him, but there’s no heat in it, and his eyes won’t settle anywhere except Martin.

“I should be making my own–”

“_This_ isn’t your decision,” Jon insists. “You made that when they first asked you, and I’m not going to let you change it–”

“You’re not going to _let_ me?” Tim echoes, the snarl on his face a forced, unfelt counterpoint to the tears that have risen into his eyes.

“Him nor me,” Daisy manages, though she’s holding herself up against Tim’s back, probably couldn’t stand if she tried.

“Tim.” Martin’s voice is rough, any chance at volume ripped out of it. “Listen to them, you can’t–”

“Where are we going?” Tim asks Wells, his only response to Martin a gentle touch at his forehead, as he starts to lower him carefully the rest of the way onto the floor.

“Nowhere yet,” Wells says, and the circle pushes even tighter. “I don’t think you’re fully understanding what has to happen for you to join us.”

Jon remembers a second before it starts again, with a sensation in his chest like a can being crushed. The rest of them had killed the people who had brought them back – friends, family, lovers, all of them. They want Tim to do that.

He hears Martin lose his breath again almost in slow motion, every cubic centimetre of air being forced from his lungs. Tim’s wordless noise of horror, Daisy’s curse. Martin’s limbs go stiff, and he turns his face into Tim’s chest, his desperate attempts to inhale nothing but a useless rasping against his shirt. Daisy reaches out, but there’s nothing she can do, nothing that either of them can do.

“If you’re not going to sever that connection yourself,” Wells says, calmly. “Then we are perfectly prepared to do it for you.”

* * *

It is almost, _so very almost_, enough for Tim to never want to feel anything again. His whole body hurts from crouching there, Martin in his arms, watching as the life goes out of him, his grip on Tim tightening, and then slowly starting to relax. Fading out.

“No,” he says, quietly. He’s vaguely aware that somewhere, someone is shouting. He can’t tell if it’s Jon or Daisy or one of the monsters, and he doesn’t particularly care. His own breathing is in shreds, in sympathy with Martin’s, and he doesn’t blame his voice for not being able to pierce the maelstrom around him.

Martin doesn’t hear him either. Tim can see that he’s dying, though he doesn’t know the shape of it, if it’s some sort of bullshit mystical force or just his organs being shut down, one by one. He needs it to stop.

He knows how many monsters there are. Had counted and recognised them all before. It’s not enough for Jon to hit Wells, because the others will just step into his place, each of them offering a shoulder to bear the coffin. Jon doesn’t have enough hands. Jon isn’t enough. Daisy isn’t enough, not anymore. No one else is here.

They’ll end Martin like he had the fly, wish a thing dead and watch it happen, second after agonising second. Tim will never be able to pick up all the pieces. Will never want to.

“No,” he says, again, more firmly, and this time it seems to ripple out of him. It’s not a lot. Just the slightest of shoves, barely more than the faintest pulse across his senses. But he sees Jon stop as if on the other side of the world, swaying around to look at him, at the same time as that slick smile of Wells’ bursts into a full grin.

Martin’s hand knots into his shirt, and he starts to breathe again. Holds onto Tim so tightly that his fingers are probably going to be stuck like that for hours. He’s still hurting, his whole body taut, and trying to drag in enough air to insist that Tim doesn’t go. He thinks he doesn’t have time for anything else, before it starts again.

It isn’t going to start again. He’s just taken that first step towards giving the monsters everything that they’d come here for.

“Shhhh,” he says, to Martin, and refusing to look anywhere else. He strokes his face, trying to soothe both of them, though he’s sure it works exactly as poorly for Martin as it does for him. There’s a feeling in his head like freefalling, and he won’t be rid of it.

Martin’s eyes focus on him again. He has no idea, Tim realises, what’s just happened. He expects the others will tell him. Jon knows. Every single one of the monsters had felt it, and so they should have. He had just tried to cut every single one of them from existence. Not strong enough. Not yet. But one day.

“I see,” Wells says. Tim wants to get up, punch him as hard as he can, keep doing it until not even a creature of the End could get back up again. Make him understand that Tim is never going to choose him, not while he still gets to decide who he is. “You’ll be able to find us. When you need us.” He takes a step back, withdrawing. “And I expect that you’ll find that’s sooner than you think.”

“Go to hell,” Tim says. He tries to shuffle around, put his body between them and Martin, but Daisy is still holding herself up against his back, and he can’t make it more than a couple of millimetres. He doesn’t keep trying – it would barely even have been a symbolic gesture. They all know it’s over.

He doesn’t look up as the monsters leave. Doesn’t want to see the triumph on their faces. He hears the door open, catches it in his peripheral vision as they file out. Then they’re gone, and Jon’s starting to approach them, slowly, his hands held out.

“Tim?” he says, his voice held soft, as if in an attempt not to startle him. He misses the mark, just sounds bewildered. “What you did…”

“Was exactly what they wanted me to do,” Tim concludes, emptily.

“That doesn’t matter.” Jon crouches beside him, reaches out for a moment like he wants to wrap his arms around all of them. He doesn’t, and Tim’s chest aches too much to work out if he would have wanted him to. His gaze flickers between Tim and Martin for a moment, like he’s trying to work out if Tim’s a danger to him. He probably is. Can’t let go. “Just, don’t do it anymore, all right? Promise me.”

Tim turns his face towards him, but can’t properly look his way. Martin’s eyes have slid closed, and he can’t watch anything but his breathing.

“I can’t,” he says. “They were killing him.”

“You can’t do it anymore.” It’s from Daisy this time, her hand squeezing at his arm where Jon’s had seemed unable to reach. “You have to keep choosing, remember?”

Tim shakes his head, still staring numbly down at Martin. He shivers, slightly, and Tim tries to pull him in closer, can’t.

“They’re going to come back,” he says, almost no inflection to it. “If I don’t go to them, they’ll come back, and they’ll make me do it again, and if I have to…”

“You _won’t_,” Jon declares, makes another aborted reach for him. “They’re not going to be coming back. Not for a while.”

Tim snorts, and the air tastes bitter on his tongue.

“Scared them off, did you?” he says. “I’m surprised you didn’t break your hand with a punch like that.”

“It would have healed,” Jon says, but he glances down at it, like he’s not entirely sure that he hadn’t.

“They’ll come back,” Tim repeats, pushing on past the distraction. “Nothing you did had any effect on them, so they’ll just–”

“Tim,” Daisy says, gripping his arm a little harder, and pointing towards the wall. Her voice is harder than Jon’s, has a force to it that seems to pull him back towards something which he might one day be able to call grounded. “Just look, will you?”

It’s an effort, to tear his gaze away from Martin, to stop watching the colour filter far too slowly back into his face. A part of him is convinced that if he isn’t keeping an eye on it, all the progress will be lost. Then Martin’s hand is clutching at his, clumsily trying to lace their fingers, and he lets himself be reassured into just one fleeting glance away.

And then he stops and stares for a while, because the door that the monsters had left through isn’t there anymore.


	19. Chapter 19

It takes Tim a dull, stretching minute to understand what that means. His thoughts are too slow, like they’ve been encased in treacle, and by the time that he’s worked it out, he hears the door opening again, this time in a different wall. He feels it, a haze through his head like static. It wants him to turn, walk into it, mistake it for the exit he’s looking for, be lost in those corridors until there’s no fear in him left to feed on.

He pushes it away as best he can, tries to focus in on Martin and Daisy again – Daisy at least seems to be supporting herself now, though she’s still sitting, her hand pressed against her forehead like she’s fighting off a migraine. Martin’s limp but still breathing, and that’s a lot better than it had been.

“Are you okay?” he asks Daisy, for all that it’s a stupid question – she doesn’t even look it, but for her, _okay_ must be relative, because she nods.

“He only got me once,” she says. “I’ll live. How’s he doing?”

Tim shakes his head, even though Martin’s hand is still wrapped into his, maintaining that grip. He opens his eyes a little way, but they’re bleary and unfocussed, and he closes them again, pressing his face back into Tim’s shirt. He shifts slightly, trying to sit properly, arrange Martin more comfortably in his lap. Daisy reaches out to help, but she seems to overbalance, has to settle back onto her haunches again. She looks like she’s been hit by a truck.

“Did you get rid of them?” Jon’s asking, in the background, his voice low, like he doesn’t want them to hear, talking to Helen somewhere over Tim’s shoulder.

“I couldn’t keep them in the corridors,” Helen says, the strange echo of her voice swimming through Tim’s skull. “They found the way through too easily. But I put the door on a container ship in the Pacific Ocean. It will take them a while to make it back.”

“Right,” Jon says, sighs out, with an undercurrent of frustration that Tim understands all too well. “Did Melanie tell you what was going on?”

“Yes,” Helen says. “And then she went to meet – here they are now.”

Tim glances around, just as Basira and Melanie come stalking into the Archives – Basira has a gun that he thinks might once have been Daisy’s, and Melanie is holding a knife in a tight, white-knuckled grip. He doesn’t know what good those things would have done. If Wells and his sort could have been stopped by something as mundane as bullets.

They lower their weapons the second that they see that there’s nothing there, and Basira immediately moves to stand alongside Daisy, the gun held at half-mast, though she doesn’t really look, her face still angled out towards the rest of the Archives.

“You okay?” she asks, a little too brisk, the cracks starting to show through.

“I’ll be fine,” Daisy tells her. She nods, and starts to head away, into the shelves and filing cabinets, ready to check the place through. Tim opens his mouth to tell her that they’d gone through Helen’s door, and then realises that he hasn’t got a clue how many of them there are. There might be more, lurking, ready to help guide him through to what they want him to become.

He shudders, and Martin’s hand tightens on his in response.

“Are you all right?” Martin asks, the words blurred and near-silent. Tim blinks at him, the question taking a moment to sink in.

“Of course I’m not all right,” he finds himself saying, more roughly than he’d intended. “I thought they were going to – they _were_ going to kill you, and there was nothing I could do–”

“They’re gone now,” Daisy interjects, and Tim snorts, ignores the way that Martin is trying to get his eyes open again, trying to meet his.

“You heard Helen,” he says. “They’ll be back.”

“Not for a while,” Helen says, and Tim can’t even flinch at her approach, though her hands form new, more awful angles, from his vantage point. “That was the best I could get you. I couldn’t digest them.”

“Thank you,” Daisy tells her, quietly.

“You are _very_ welcome,” Helen says, and Tim can hear that endlessly curling smile in her voice as she does. She starts to move off towards her door again and Tim notices Melanie hurrying after her, catching at her arm.

Jon steps into his field of view again, and he drops his eyes back to Martin.

“I found the statement.” Jon clears his throat, and then crouches next to them again, a little further away than is comfortable for conversation. “The one about the album. We might be able to use it – I may be able to think of something that we can do to stop them.”

“They won’t be back immediately,” Daisy says, but her words are starting to come out a little too raw. “They seemed to think they didn’t need to, that–”

“That I’m going to become a monster on my own,” Tim concludes, the possibility a pit behind his sternum.

“That’s not going to happen,” Martin mumbles, muffled but coherent. He runs his thumb along Tim’s index finger, a tentative attempt at soothing.

_You won’t be able to stop it_, Tim doesn’t say. It’s not true. Not entirely. If there had never been any outside interference, or never would be again, maybe he could. But it feels too much to put on him. Especially when he can’t even sit under his own power.

“I was going to wait for you,” Jon goes on, doesn’t engage with the rest of it. “To read it, I thought you would both want to–”

“You go ahead,” Tim says, and it’s not even an effort to get it out. To trust Jon with it. It should have been. Would have been, once. “I need to get Martin and Daisy somewhere more comfortable.”

“I’m fine,” Martin announces, tries to sit up, and thumps back into Tim’s lap immediately, wincing, without getting even slightly vertical. Jon uses the moment to withdraw, and Tim doesn’t stop him.

“We’ll get you to the safe room in a bit,” Tim says. He takes in a long breath, tries to adjust his thoughts away from the yawning issue of his humanity. There are things to deal with, here and now, and he has to deal with them. “The tea’s probably got cold. Why don’t I make us some fresh drinks? You’ll probably feel better after that, and then I can get you both to bed.” He glances over at Daisy, and she nods.

“Sugar,” she advises. “We’ll probably both need the energy.”

“Right.” Tim inhales again, and starts to shuffle Martin the rest of the way onto the floor. He doesn’t fight it, lets his hand drift away from Tim’s, and Daisy moves closer to him once Tim’s standing.

He manages a quick glance at the rest of the Archives that’s supposed to be steadying – Jon’s following Basira’s path, deeper into the shelves, and Melanie and Helen are still talking quietly in front of Helen’s door.

Tim gives a short nod, mostly an attempt at an affirmation to himself, and then goes back to the kettle, emptying the now-cold drinks out into the sink. He rinses the mugs out, runs the water warm to do it, even though he usually wouldn’t have bothered. It at least seems to dull the sharp chill in his skin, and by the time that he turns back to Martin and Daisy, his hands have finally stopped shaking.

* * *

Statement of Victoria Manning, regarding the death of her brother-in-law. Original statement given July 13th 1999. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.

Statement begins.

My sister had always had pretty poor taste in men. Not drastically so – none of them were abusive or anything, they were just not that great to be around. There was that kid in sixth form who’d been arrested before the year was out, or the guy who was kind of okay, but not enough for me to get over the fact that he always smelled of the fast food joint he worked in, or the flat Earth one. So, really, Paul was the best of a bad bunch. He didn’t have any weird beliefs or ambient odours or a criminal record. He was just a bit boring and the absolute worst person to get stuck next to at April’s parties, since she had an otherwise great group of friends. He worked in something to do with traffic patterns. It was exactly as exciting to hear about as it sounds, and, of course, he always wanted to talk about it. He didn’t have any hobbies that he was interested enough in to actually get animated, and every time I saw him it was like I could feel the frustration building into some inevitable explosion.

He did love my sister, though. I could never fault him on that. Their wedding was a standard affair, church and cake and first dance. We all assumed there would be kids along soon enough, since April had always wanted them. I privately thought that once they had a couple of toddlers, a puppy – April loved animals, wanted her children to grow up with them, made sure they got a place with a big garden – I’d find Paul a bit more tolerable, a breath of fresh air in a house that would have been as chaotic as ours, growing up.

It didn’t turn out that way, of course. Car crash. Not April’s fault – she’d always been a very good driver, but doesn’t help when someone else on the road is an idiot. So then we’re burying her, and it’s the worst day of my life, so I don’t notice until we get halfway through the wake that Paul hasn’t made it there.

I find him just standing there in the rain in front of her grave, and when I touch his wrist, it’s as chilled as hers would have been.

After that, I looked out for him. I don’t want to say that I found him more tolerable – that makes me sound like a terrible person, right? It was more that our particular brands of misery overlapped, made us a better fit than we had been before we’d lost April. I didn’t really want to talk to anyone, and he didn’t seem to either. Sometimes he’d try, about his work, but it was halting and stuttering and his heart wasn’t in it, even before he got the call to say that they had to let him go.

We met up, fairly regularly. I kept an eye. April would have wanted me to, after all. She’d loved him as much as he loved her. And I needed a project – work kept trying to give me space and time to grieve, but that wasn’t what I needed. It picked up again, a little while after, and I started to turn up to our coffee shop late, but I always made it eventually, always texted out a warning, and he was always sitting there when I arrived, waiting.

That’s why it was a shock, when he didn’t come. I messaged him, sitting there with a coffee cooling on the table in front of me. There was no reply, and I didn’t stay to drink it. I went over there. Not sure what I was scared of, exactly. I just knew that he hadn’t been in a great place, and that this wasn’t a good sign. He’d always been punctual before, for everything – part of his grand spectrum of boredom – and this was _wrong_.

I had to ring the bell six times before I got anything, and that was one of the neighbours, leaning over the wall. She told me he’d been acting strange, had taken back the spare key. I apologised for the noise, and redoubled my efforts. I was about ready to call the police, or something, when he finally opened the door. Stopped with a six-inch gap, and then stood in it, so I couldn’t see much past him.

The house was dark, though. All the curtains drawn across, lights out. I was expecting him to look worse. You know the sort of thing – face drawn, bags under the eyes, stubble. But instead, I remember thinking that the smile lines seemed to be back.

They couldn’t have been, though, because he was actually rude. Told me he didn’t want to see me again, and that I shouldn’t have come round. I said okay, and asked why, and he didn’t actually seem to have an answer? Stood there for ages, and then came out with some bullshit about how I was too much like April, it upset him. I should have questioned it, but honestly I was just too surprised? April and I looked nothing like, dressed nothing alike, had wildly different tastes in everything from food to television.

He slammed the door while I was too confused to do anything about it, and a week later, he was dead. The neighbours had complained about the smell. Something about his heart, the coroner said, but they were cagey about it. We had the funeral in the same place where we’d buried April. It brought back a lot of stuff for me, so I really wasn’t in the best state for any of it. I do remember being surprised by how many people there were, though. Paul had been okay, but I hadn’t thought he’d be so popular by any stretch of the imagination. It wasn’t like there had been anyone else trying to look out for him, after April had died.

I think I just put it down to guilt. Everyone who’d lost touch, showing up now, former colleagues all thinking that they should have just paid a little more attention. I didn’t notice anything wrong, until people were starting to filter away. I don’t think we were having a wake. I didn’t go, if we did.

There was this woman. She caught my eye across the remnants of the service, her face obscured by one of those artful black mesh flower things. I couldn’t make her out properly, but when she turned to head away towards the car park, the way she walked was achingly familiar.

April had always had a pretty distinctive gait. They’d tried correcting it, when she was a child, and while they’d managed to train her out of it enough that it wouldn’t bring on any severe problems, she’d always had a slight flick to her heels. I recognised it immediately, but my brain just sort of skipped over it. Like when you’re tired and the thoughts don’t go in far enough. I just thought, _oh, there’s April_, and forgot that was impossible until thirty seconds later.

I ran after her, of course. But by then she was gone, and I’d convinced myself I’d imagined it, and I still had to go and take what I wanted from Paul’s house.

When I got there, it barely seemed like it had been touched. I let myself into a dark hallway, the curtains all still drawn. It looked like someone had been trying for cheerful in there, once, though – the hallway was lined with vases, full of what must have once been bright, colourful displays. I thought I recognised some freesias, which had always been April’s favourite, but they were so badly wilted – actively _decaying_ – that it was impossible to tell.

I don’t know why I didn’t move anything. Try to let some light in. I suppose I still didn’t really feel like I knew why he’d died, thought there might be some sort of clue in the house. Didn’t want to contaminate the crime scene, or something.

I found what I was looking for, upstairs. A notepad by his bed, one of the ones he used to use for his work stuff. It was out of place, should have been in their office. His preferred genre was historical fiction, so there should have been one of those there for night-time reading, but the shelf was undisturbed, a row of cracked spines and peeling pages.

Flipping through the pad, I found the first entry was dated the day that he’d failed to meet me at the coffee shop. They continued up until the night he died, but there was nothing in the later paragraphs that I’d have called coherent.

The observations in them weren’t of traffic patterns. They talked about a _She_, never named, but I could tell from the way that he wrote it that she was April. There was just something about it – maybe his handwriting softened, he took more care over it. They were the sort of couple where he’d try to keep anything about her as beautiful as possible.

They didn’t make a lot of sense, at first. Apparently, the album had worked, whatever that meant. She was back, just the same as she had always been. The paper was mottled like he’d been crying, letting the tears fall onto it without even bothering to try to stop them.

After that, they turned shakier. The neighbour’s bloody rooster had woken them up, and never made a noise again. It had fallen off the fence, and Paul had had to take it round. They’d blamed the cat from next door on the other side, but there hadn’t been a mark on the bird. His writing got worse again, cramped and jagged, a repeated insistence that she was wrong.

I couldn’t read any of what had happened on that last day. I folded the notebook closed, and genuinely considered taking it down to their shredder, letting it eat. My sister was dead, had died a while ago, and Paul had been sad and lonely and narrated himself a fiction to cope until he couldn’t anymore. That was all there was to it, and it made me want to cry, but it was the right day for that.

More light would help, I decided. I stood up, went to the window, and threw the curtains as wide as I could. And, I need you to understand, I have a pretty strong stomach. Considered a career in pathology, for a while, but decided I prefer my company a bit more talkative. What was out there was _bad_. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a mouse die behind your fridge. The way the odour gets everywhere, and you can never quite get rid of it?

This wasn’t just a mouse. This was _everything_. Pigeons, squirrels, songbirds. There might even have been a badger or two in there somewhere. Everything April had ever wanted to encourage, so the kids would grow up with a wildlife garden. All of it, spread out and soaking into the grass, maggots crawling and a low sheen of flies, rising up and then settling again in sickly glimmering dust devils. Even with the window pane between me and it, I don’t think I’m ever going to get that smell out of my nose.

I had to run for their en suite. Brought up what felt like everything I had eaten for the past week. I think I called someone, but I don’t remember who – maybe pest control? The council? I don’t know, I just needed it to be someone else’s problem.

When I crawled back out into the bedroom, searching for their landline, I could see the album, sitting safe and hidden between the mattress and the headboard. I tried to rip my sister out of it. It wouldn’t let me. I’ve brought it to you. Maybe you can work out how to destroy it.

Statement ends.


	20. Chapter 20

Jon turns the recorder off with a sharp click. There’s no need to record any ending notes. The statement is as unsatisfying as all the others of Gertrude’s he’s tried to record lately. Like eating a handful of rice after a week’s starvation. They barely even take the edge off, but he’s growing used to the gnawing hunger.

There are other implications, with this one. Just as well, he decides, with a long sigh, that Tim had told him to record without them. He wouldn’t have wanted either him or Martin to hear this. The knot behind his sternum that had loosened when Tim had refused the other monsters is back to tightening again, to the point where it feels like he will have to be cut free.

Manning, the woman he’d met in the bar, whose rabbit had been taken by a fox – he remembers every second of that screaming death – had seemed normal at first. Had been so close to it that not even her husband had been able to tell that there had been anything wrong. She’d been herself, and then she had turned.

There was no reason why Tim should be any different. Delayed, perhaps, like Wells had said, by the influence of the Eye, the way that the other powers have difficulty reaching into the Archives. But she had carried off the one who had brought her back, just as Wells had told him Tim would, clearly enough.

After what the monsters had made him do, it might only be a matter of time.

Jon reaches for his phone, and dials Victoria Manning’s number without having to look it up. His fingers know which digits to press, just the same as he knows that she’s now working as a receptionist at a veterinary surgery in Colchester, or that the day before she’d been nipped by an irate Yorkshire Terrier named Mr Tussocks.

It rings for a while, and then there’s a click, a woman’s voice speaking down the line.

“Manning,” she says, professional but not unfriendly.

“Hello,” Jon says. “I…” He doesn’t have a proper lie prepared – Tim would have, had always been good at that, letting the person at the other end assume he was from a utilities company in a way that Jon was sure was barely on the right side of legal. “I’m from the Magnus Institute.”

“Oh.” There’s a noticeable drop of temperature in the noise. Jon wonders, briefly, if she had seen Gertrude in her dreams, whether they had trapped her at her brother-in-law’s funeral or in his house, the garden. No reason to hate _him_, except by association.

“I’ve just read the statement you made,” he says, trying to keep his tone carefully neutral.

“Left it a bit late, haven’t you?” Victoria snaps, ready to lapse into anger at the slightest provocation. Jon doesn’t flinch. He’s heard a lot of the same, from people who had given statements or known those who had. Before Prentiss, he’d wondered sometimes how they’d managed to get so far without any of their staff being attacked. Afterwards, any threat that a mundane person could have offered had seemed insignificant.

“I work in the Archives,” Jon says. It sounds like a lame excuse even to his own ears, but he has no interest in begging for her forgiveness. “I was hoping to check a few things.”

“I don’t have a lot of time,” Victoria informs him, still sharp, not placated. “And I don’t particularly want to talk to you anyway.”

“It’ll only take a minute–”

“Oh?” She’s almost shouting now, takes a second to control her voice, force it quieter, but he can still hear the fury in it, crackling through the syllables like electricity. “Just a _minute_? You realise she could have had my _whole life_, right? I talked to you, what, ten years ago? And you did precisely fuck all. If she’d killed me, would this be the first you’d have heard of it?”

“I’m sorry,” Jon says. He doesn’t think he means it. He’d like to. Knows that that doesn’t really count. “I really am, but I need your help–”

“I needed yours,” she says, growing more distant as she moves the phone away from her ear, ready to hang up on him. After that, she’ll block his number.

“I think someone’s used the album again.” It’s not too bad a lie, not even the worst one that he’s used in the call. Just because he knows for a fact that Martin had used it doesn’t mean that he necessarily thinks it any less.

There’s a short pause, and for a moment he thinks he’s lost her anyway, and then he hears the crackle of a sigh, the noise brittle against the mouthpiece.

“I thought you had it locked up,” she says. “You were _supposed_ to have it locked up.”

“We did,” Jon says. Hesitates, reaches. “We _do_.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have had any problems–”

“One of my colleagues died.” Jon can feel his voice starting to turn rough again, the way he’d been shouting at Wells and the others catching up with him. “One of the others… didn’t take it well.”

This time the silence lasts longer. He can almost see the wheels turning in her head – he pictures her, standing, stopped partway through her route to the nearest café to the surgery. She’s turned in towards a shop window, but people still have to divert around her, frowning and muttering, and she curses their reflections.

“He seems like the real him,” Jon goes on, starting to waver. “He really does, but after reading your statement…”

“Look,” Victoria says, still forthright, though some of the sting in it is gone. “I can’t help. I’m sorry. Paul didn’t tell me when he brought her back. I never spoke to her, from before or after she was acting herself. For all I know, she never was, and he was just seeing what he wanted to see. From what he wrote, it seemed like it started going wrong when things started dying around her, but–”

“Do you still have the notes?” he asks. Maybe, he’ll be able to decipher more of her brother-in-law’s handwriting than she could.

“I gave them in to your Institute with everything else,” she says, unimpressed. “Are you people not organised _at all_? I don’t know why you didn’t destroy that fucking photo album, if you had–”

“You tried, didn’t you?” Jon doesn’t need the question – he knows that she did, that she tried to tear April out, watched in horror as the photo and the page knit themselves back together. That she’d wanted to try everything else she could think of, but a part of her had been afraid that the book might fight back.

“I’ve given you everything I had,” she says, stiffly. “It’s not my fault you can’t find it.”

“No,” Jon agrees, softly. “It isn’t.”

“Well then,” she says. “Don’t call this number again. Can’t say it’s been a pleasure.”

She hangs up, leaves him alone with that long steady tone and no idea what to do.

He wants to believe that April Manning had been herself for as long as her husband had thought she was. It had gone wrong for her, it seems, when she had started to use her abilities, perhaps unconsciously at first. The rooster, and then the rest of their garden, and then her husband.

Tim has already taken a step down that path. He’d done it for Martin and Daisy, but he’d still done it, and, if Manning’s statement, her brother-in-law’s scribblings, are to be believed, it isn’t a long process.

Jon glares down at the statement until it feels like Manning’s looped handwriting is imprinting itself in negative on the backs of his eyelids. There is still something in his chest insisting, clutching at the idea that Tim just won’t be like that. He’s got Martin. Martin will keep him human.

But Manning’s sister had loved her husband, and he’d loved her, and it hadn’t been enough then. He can’t think of a reason why it would be now. Perhaps because of the Eye, because Tim knows it’s coming, but those suppositions feel as firm as matchsticks.

Jon lifts his head, and stares bleakly at his own locked door. He has to talk to Martin.

* * *

It’s over a day before Jon can even get near him. It takes him a long time to recover from what Wells and the others had done, and he spends around the first twenty-seven hours of it sleeping it off. Tim hovers around him constantly, never goes far from the safe room, and is attentive to every soft, sleep-filled murmur.

Remembering the part from Victoria Manning’s statement, Jon takes flowers, a bunch of deep blue-purple irises that he would like to have taken no time at all over choosing, but that had been far from the case, and there’s no point in pretending, just to himself.

Tim gives him an odd look when he brings them, but he awkwardly helps Jon set them up on one of the boxes, the vase at a concerning but apparently stable angle. The album is still sitting next to the bed, and he can’t help a narrow-eyed glance at it, softening at the sight of Martin’s sleeping face.

The next time he visits, they’re still in bloom, and Tim tells him that Martin had woken up, briefly, been thrilled, and fussed at him to give them some more water before they could wilt.

They survive long after the ones that he’d bought for Daisy for the purposes of plausible deniability and as a control group. Neither she nor Basira had been fooled. Melanie, he’s less sure about, but it’s not his business whether she’d believed that he’d brought them because that’s what he’s supposed to do when people are ill or not. She’s been clear enough about her boundaries, and he’s not going to press them.

Melanie and Basira are always there, like Tim is. They’ve set Daisy up on the camp bed over the trapdoor into the tunnels, and sit there with her like twin sentinels. She recovers faster than Martin does, insists on continuing to do her exercises. Seems to be even walking okay, after a couple of days, but she doesn’t visit Tim. Jon can’t decide if it’s just that the distance from the trapdoor to the safe room is a little far for her at the moment, or if Basira’s suspicions are starting to filter through to her, too. He doesn’t think he’d be able to blame her – the monsters had hurt her and Martin badly, and Basira’s distrust had never been based on anything but logic and experience.

The first time that Jon walks into the safe room and finds no sign of Tim, it’s been a week and a half, and he has to look around three times before he believes it. Martin’s there on his own, sitting on the floor, leaning his back against the bed. He looks up as Jon enters, quick and darting, and rubs his wrists across his eyes.

Jon stops a couple of metres away, the door swinging closed behind him, and frowns. Martin’s cheeks are flushed, slightly wet, and while he only catches sight of his hands for a moment before they withdraw into oversized, frayed sleeves, they seem to be shaking.

“Martin?” he says, crossing the rest of the distance slowly, checking Martin’s reactions with each step. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t do anything to indicate that Jon’s presence is unwanted. Once he’s as close as he dares, he crouches next to him, peers into his face. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” Martin says, and then pauses, making an effort to steady his voice. “Fine,” he goes on, a little more strongly. “Sorry. Thought I was ready to get out of bed on my own, but it seems like that wasn’t the best idea.”

“Do you need help getting back up?” Jon asks, glancing from him to the bed and back again, not sure if he’s even supposed to be offering.

“I’m okay here for the moment,” Martin says. “It’s not much of a change of scenery, but it is one.”

“Right,” Jon says. He hesitates, uncertain. He’s had days to try to work out what to say to Martin about the statement, and he still doesn’t have it in a way that feels right. “Where’s Tim?”

“He went out,” Martin announces, a listless tone to his voice. He fusses at his sleeves a little more, clearly not content with it.

“He left you?” Jon can’t keep the surprise from his voice – Tim had been so attentive that he’d thought he’d never see them apart again.

“He doesn’t want me going out,” Martin tells him, barely shy of a resentful mutter. “He thinks that the other people – the monsters – he thinks they’re going to be out there, and he’s worried.” It sounds reason enough to Jon’s ears, but Martin sighs through it. “He should be back soon though, if you wanted to talk to him.”

“Actually,” Jon says. “I was hoping to talk to–”

The door chooses that exact moment to crash open, and Jon startles around to see Tim pushing through, holding a plastic bag in each hand, branded with the logo of a takeaway that Jon doesn’t recognise.

“Sorry about that,” he’s saying. “The queue was like nothing I’ve ever seen. Seemed like everyone in London was there, did the population really go up that much while I was–” He stops, the bags hanging limply at his sides. “Oh. Jon.”

“Tim,” Jon says, guardedly. He glances away, notices the irises, still balanced precariously on their box. Still healthy, to the point that he’s half-wondering if Tim and Martin have missed their calling as some sort of botanical care duo. They would enjoy gardening, he thinks, Tim the nature of the work and Martin every fresh shoot. “I was just–” He swallows it. He doesn’t have to make any excuses to Tim as to why he might be in the same place as Martin. They’re the ones in a secret relationship. He was occasionally in the same place as Martin before that had started, and he will occasionally be in the same place as Martin now that it has, and they’re both going to have to get used to it.

“Martin and I were just going to have dinner,” Tim says, his tone almost light. He hasn’t talked to Jon like this in a long time, not even when he’d come to him for advice, and he has to fight off something that feels confused, is nearly a smile. “Do you want to join us?”

Jon waits for the inevitable comment about whether or not he still needs to eat, or that there’s a statement in the box he could have, but nothing comes. There’s nothing as sharp as usual about Tim’s attitude. He can’t tell if it’s meant, or if it’s just that Tim’s too tired to make anything as spiked as he should, spending every waking hour watching over Martin.

“Thanks,” Jon says, after a minute. “But I have to go and…” He hesitates, trying to think what he could possibly have to do. Nothing comes to mind, his head too focussed on the problem of Tim.

“Statement?” Martin suggests, distantly. The word draws Tim’s attention to him – he mutters something indistinct, setting the bags down and immediately going to Martin’s side, reaching for his arm. He brushes against Jon as he does so, and doesn’t react. He should have recoiled.

“What are you doing down here?” Tim admonishes, but Martin waves him off, hands steadier now.

“It’s fine down here,” he insists. “Can we just eat on the floor like we did before?”

Tim pauses, and then withdraws a little, though that need to fuss is still almost crackling through the air around him. The monsters hadn’t been like that. Wells and Manning, everything about them had lacked this. Tim _cares_, still. That would be plain to anyone watching.

Jon can’t help but wonder how long it’s going to last.


	21. Chapter 21

It’s the noise of Martin’s hand on the door that wakes Tim. He starts back to consciousness at the squeak of the handle turning, reaches reflexively into the space next to him on the bed, and finds it cold. He can see him, in the dim light, standing motionless, aside from the slow rotation of his wrist. Trying not to disturb him.

“Off somewhere, Martin?” Tim asks, pointed, overloud even at his usual volume. He’s expecting Martin’s startled twitch, and smothers the spark of pleasure away before he can properly feel it.

“Out,” Martin says, nonspecific and mutinous. “I need some air.”

“There’s plenty of air in here,” Tim points out. Stale, hanging, stirred only by the dehumidifiers in the corners, but still air.

“You know what I mean,” Martin says.

“And you were planning to go on your own?” Tim straightens up, swings his legs around to sit on the edge of the bed. There’s no accompanying flare of exhaustion, hasn’t been since Wells and the others had left.

“I’m perfectly capable of going outside on my own, Tim,” Martin turns back towards him, glaring, the movement so steady that he’s clearly making a point out of it. “I’m walking fine now.”

“And the monsters?” Tim pushes. He stands, folds his arms across his chest. “Are you planning to _walk_ away from them?”

“They’re gone,” Martin says, shrugging one shoulder.

“No,” Tim corrects him, sharp and trying not to leave any room for argument. “They’re coming back. You heard them – they want me to be a monster with them, and they’re going to hurt you to do it, so–”

“So they’re not going to bother with me if you’re not around,” Martin finishes, voice rising to match Tim’s. “You were fine with Daisy going out.”

“_Daisy_ took Basira and Melanie with her, and she didn’t go far,” Tim counters. He’d also not had any choice in the matter, had only learned about it when she’d called in and brought them a coffee shop toastie each.

“Then I’ll take Jon,” Martin offers.

“_No_,” Tim repeats. He has no idea where a suggestion like that was even supposed to start convincing him – if anything it’s just another item on the stack of all the reasons that Martin shouldn’t go anywhere.

“I know you think he’s not right, but he–”

“Yeah, he’s trying, I know.” Tim takes a moment, inhales. “It’s not about Jon. It’s about you not getting the life drained out of you again.”

“They’re _gone_,” Martin repeats, stubborn, refusing to give ground. He starts to reach for the handle again, behind his back, like he thinks that Tim won’t notice.

“Helen dropped them off in the Pacific Ocean,” Tim reminds him, taking a step closer. He’s not planning on grabbing him, dragging him back, but if Martin does open the door, there’s no way he’s letting him go out by himself. “They could already be back in port.”

“Even if they were,” Martin says. “They’re not coming back. They think you’re going to go to them on your own, so there’s no need to come and threaten us again. What if I took Daisy _and_ Jon with me?”

“You _cannot_ be sure of that!” Tim snaps, hands clenching to fists at his sides. “Unless you’ve got some secret knowledge powers like Jon, in which case, show me your crystal ball. But until then, no.”

Martin hesitates, and it lasts so long that Tim’s sure he could have fit another rational argument in there.

“You’ve been out,” he says, but there’s almost an uncertainty there. “And you’re the one they want.”

“I’m not the one who was dying,” Tim says, roughly, more from the memory of what had happened than from any actual anger at Martin. He’d thought they’d never get out of that, had felt his own helplessness as surely as a pinned bug.

“I’m feeling much better now, Tim, honestly,” Martin tells him. Tim almost wants to laugh at that – there’s no way he could have got any _worse_.

“Are you feeling _fine_?”

Martin doesn’t answer immediately, and that’s all Tim needs.

“Clearly not,” he surmises. “So, stay here today. If you need anything I can get it for you. If you want some fresh air, maybe go up to the Library with Jon. They open the windows up there sometimes.”

“They _have_ windows up there,” Martin mutters.

“Just come back to bed, okay?” Tim says, trying to push any trace of the argument out of his voice. “We’ll talk again at a more reasonable hour.”

“It’s nearly half past nine–”

“_At a more reasonable hour_,” Tim repeats, clearly. Morning work is for jobs that haven’t trapped him and people he cares about in a nightmare that is only going to end with their deaths.

Martin sighs, but he comes back. Sits down on the end of the bed, and starts to undo his shoes, making as much of the action as he can. He lets Tim kiss his temple on the way past, a meagre attempt at an apology that he can’t really put into words, because Martin still wants out and it still isn’t safe.

Daisy brings them hot drinks and pastries at eleven on the dot, and Martin takes them with thanks and a pointed glare at Tim.

“How was it outside?” he asks, without really looking at her, attention still fixed on Tim.

“Still no sign,” Daisy says. “Hopefully they ended up in America – Melanie says Helen said she couldn’t be sure which direction the ship was heading in.”

“In which case they could have taken a plane and been back in London in eight hours,” Tim mutters, shooting Daisy a hard glance. “You should be careful out there.”

“I was?” Daisy blinks at him, aborts a reach for his coffee like she’s considering taking it away again. “Basira came with me. If anything was wrong, she’d spot it.”

“Right,” Tim says. He tips his head towards Martin, and she follows it, understanding dawning. She turns a look of sympathy on him, and hands him another packet of sugar for his tea.

“You want out?” she says.

“Can’t remember what the sun looks like,” Martin mutters, with a nod.

“You won’t see any sign of it out there,” Daisy tells him. “All clouds. No rain yet, though, so you might still be able to–”

“No,” Tim interjects. “He couldn’t.” He skewers Martin with a glare, and keeps talking to Daisy. “He’s still getting dizzy when he tries to walk for too long. If he had to run–”

“_He_ is right here.” Martin’s voice is starting to push shriller again, and Daisy barely manages to control a wince.

“Should pass soon,” she offers. “That was one of my last symptoms, so once you’ve got past that and the last bits of nausea, you’ll be out the other side. Should be safe for you to go out again then.”

“No,” Tim says, flatly. “Those things are still out there, so–”

“We can’t stay in here forever,” Martin argues, and he has a point, Tim _hates_ that he has a point, his brain spitting like fish in a frying pan. “They’re gone. They’re waiting for you now, so we don’t have to worry for a bit.”

“Why are you so certain that they won’t–”

“Why are you so certain that they _will_?”

“Because that is the sort of luck that we have!” Tim rounds on Daisy, who has started to back away, clearly wanting no part of the argument. “Daisy. You felt what they did. Surely you can’t want to risk–”

“I think if we stay sitting around here forever, it’s not going to be great either,” Daisy says.

“Some of us are going to face consequences from a lack of sunlight,” Martin agrees, but he’s not going after his shoes again.

“Just give it a few more days, okay?” Tim presses, his attention flickering between them, though Daisy gets a little further away with each pass. “I… I can’t protect you from them. Not without risking going over the line and reaching the point where I don’t care if you’re protected or not. Jon can’t protect you. So, please. Stay here a little longer.”

“Fine,” Martin says. He’s still not happy, but Tim will take it for now. Still wishes he could make him understand, explain how he can’t sleep, that he’s waiting every moment of dark for those familiar, hated silhouettes, dreading the future where he joins them to carry Martin’s coffin down towards the earth.

* * *

Jon isn’t using the library for its intended purpose. The book sitting in front of him is open, but he isn’t reading it. Had only laid it out that way for the sake of plausible deniability, though he knows that no one’s going to challenge him. He had managed to clear the table by the window just by walking towards it with the clear intention of using it. The rest of the Institute wants nothing to do with the Archives, and he doesn’t care. So long as they still let him and the others take books out and answer their emails when needed, he has no issues with it. It’s probably for the best – there’s a fair chance that some of the people who have chosen to work at the Magnus Institute will have statements that he could take from them, if he pleases, and he doesn’t.

For now, it grants him his own space with a good view out over the street below. It’s as quiet as it ever gets, tourists trickling down towards the river, and locals zigzagging behind them in an attempt to get past. He’s not looking for them. He’s looking for stillness. People watching the building a little too closely. That was how Basira had described them. Points of intensity, with all their attention focussed on the Institute.

He doesn’t see them. Nothing down there but false alerts; every time one of the tourists stops, the ripples radiate out through the foot traffic, catching his attention and making him search for the source. It’s never someone he recognises, though he’s done his best to burn every face in the album into his memory.

They’re all new. Some of them have stopped to gawk, leaning over to make some comment or other to their friends. He thinks he could know what they were saying, if he tried hard enough. Can almost hear the sounds of their voices, in the back of his mind, the shapes of the words that they’re saying. All of it, just waiting for him to reach for it.

He doesn’t, though there’s a tug in his chest towards them, that wants to know if they’re scornful or curious and what they would do if they met a real monster.

He can ignore it, keep his watch. Right up until one of the hints of something takes on the glow of fear, and the whole thing blossoms in his head.

Their friend is a sceptic, is making some joke or other about what the leaked Institute documents had shown, and they feel a burst of panic so complete that they have to struggle to keep their feet from fleeing, let alone laugh out a response in kind. They’re hiding what had happened to them. They’re afraid their friend will think they’ve taken leave of their senses. They can’t tell them about the lost horizon or that endless, painful blue, the itching in their chest that had left them moving north in search of cloudier skies.

They’re lonely in their knowledge, and so afraid that it’ll be found out. They hadn’t wanted to come this way. They couldn’t explain why not. Every stone of the Institute is a threat to them. It would take barely more than a single word, to get their statement out of them – they’re considering giving it now, looking towards the door. Wondering what it would be like to walk between those pillars. They’ll meet Rosie, Jon knows, and she’ll send them on down to the Archives to give their statement. It would spill out so easily, a quick puncture to let everything flow, and then it would be _his_.

They turn away. They can’t think how to explain it to their friend. They don’t think they could reach the right level of irreverence to make them believe that the whole thing is a joke, not when their stomach is so full of butterflies. They can’t let them know. They can’t let _anyone_ know. If there was another leak, everyone would.

Jon is halfway across the library before he’s even realised that he’s moving, his book abandoned on the table. He can still catch them. They’re moving down towards the bridge, leaving their friend to trail after them. There’s little chance that they’ll be back this way, but once they hit the river they’ll slow down, taking in the sights, and he has purpose.

He’ll feel everything that they want to keep hidden. He’ll feel satisfied again, for the first time in months. He’ll be less _hollow_. Maybe even strong enough to keep everyone safe.

He doesn’t stop until he reaches the foyer. Ignores Rosie’s greeting, instead looking out through the door, onto the street. They’re still just within sight, far slower than they want to walk, but their friend is holding them back. He can just make out their rucksack with his own eyes, a proper one for hiking that’s a little too bulky for the tube. They’re on the edge of his field of vision, just pushing through a clot of people out of it.

The glass is cold against Jon’s hand. He flinches back from it, abruptly shocked back into his own self. An attempt to smother the hunger achieves nothing. He turns, still ignoring Rosie, though the shape of her face has become concerned, and starts to hurry back to the Archives.

There are plenty of statements to record down there that won’t hurt anyone, that he knows of. He just has to get there.

Every step that he takes away from that fresh story aches. He can feel the angles of their statement, and there’s a murmuring in his head that maybe, if he won’t go after them, he could pull it from them anyway, like he had with Breekon. It might not hurt them – Breekon had been of the Stranger, and being known had been his antithesis. This is just another human. Might not even feel it.

Jon closes his eyes, his face tensing to keep them so, and tries to move faster. He doesn’t need to look where he’s going. He knows the path to the Archives by heart, and anyone approaching will surely be sensible enough to get out of his way.

The statement he finds is about a man who had got lost inside a pyramid, and the walls had narrowed and narrowed and _narrowed_. It does nothing to fill the place in him where the Vast should have gone.


	22. Chapter 22

The coffin wants him. Tim had been able to feel it even out in the corridor, a tentative tug at his mind. It’ll move his limbs without his permission, back out to the desk, to get the key from the Artefact Storage assistant who pretends he can’t remember him. He won’t refuse him, just like he hadn’t refused him access to the room. As far as the rest of the Institute is concerned, it’s best not to interfere with Archives business.

He’ll come back in, the metal cold against his hands, and he’ll unlock the heavy padlocks that hold the chains – push them off, hear the dulled thud of finality as they hit the floorboards. His fingers will brush for a moment against that lettering as he lifts the lid. And then he’ll go down, into the dark and the earth, and neither the Eye nor the End will ever be able to reach him again. No more dreams of Danny, no more monsters, no more Martin or Jon. Just the press of the earth on all sides, cutting off his breathing. Singing to him, faintly, with the resonance of space he will never feel again.

Except, he won’t. The compulsion seems to part around him like a river against a rock - he can feel that it’s there, and perhaps one day it might wear him down, but for now, he can resist. If he goes in, it’ll be his own, clear-headed choice.

He sits on the floor opposite it, and thinks around the edges. Measures the letters, jagged and deep. He wonders who put them there, if anyone had. If it had been a desperate attempt from a victim to stop anyone else making their mistakes, or if it’s just a part of the coffin’s trap, pulling at the part of the human brain that needs to disobey.

Behind him, the door opens, quietly, and he doesn’t turn his head, even when they sit down alongside him.

“Hey.” Daisy. Not that it was ever going to be anyone else. She’s the only one who would know to look for him here. Jon could, he supposes, but he doesn’t think he would.

“Hey,” Tim says.

They both watch the coffin for a while, listening to the low, faint hum that tells them it’s raining. Daisy looks at it more intently than he does, stares at it like Jon does spiders. He wonders if she feels that compulsion too, if maybe she spends so much time with it in an attempt to learn to resist it.

“You told Martin you were going out,” she says, eventually. It’s carefully devoid of judgement, leaves him to fill his own in.

“Yeah,” he says, does what he can to make it not feel like an admission. “I am, in a bit. Just wanted to come here for a bit first.” Martin doesn’t know about the coffin, wouldn’t understand. Would just be upset if Tim told him.

“You know he’s up to going out himself, now?”

“Probably.” Tim gives a tight, one-shouldered shrug, that Daisy probably only sees in her peripheral vision.

“You still don’t want him to?” Again, that careful, intentional lack of anything that might put him on the defensive.

“I’m not keeping him prisoner or anything,” Tim says. “If he really wanted to go I wouldn’t stop him. Might make sure someone went with him, but that’s just not being an idiot.”

“But _you_ don’t want him to leave.”

“No.” Tim manages to glance sideways at her for a moment - her hands are clenched a little too tight, all her focus still on the coffin. “There are monsters out there whose stated intention is either for me to kill him, or they’ll do it. I don’t think not wanting to expose him to that makes me unreasonable. If he got hurt, if he was gone...”

“You think they’ll be nothing left to stay human for?” she suggests, with no flicker in her face to suggest it’s how _she_ feels.

“No,” Tim says, scrapes a hand over his eyes hard enough that he sees stars. “No, it’s not that, god, no, he hasn’t agreed to anything _like_ that, I can’t put that on him. Martin’s not the only reason, not the only thing that’s going to stop it. I don’t want to be a monster. He just…”

“He makes it easier.”

Tim makes a vague, noncommittal noise. It sounds right. He doesn’t want it to. Martin’s not his morality chain. Martin’s not his _anything_.

“Is that why you’re here?” Daisy asks. “Looking at the other options?”

“Not many other options, are there?” he points out, with a long, frustrated breath. “Nothing Jon did had any effect on… on those _things_. Helen couldn’t hold them.” He gestures at the coffin, everything in the movement of his arm angry. It doesn’t retaliate. “I don’t think, if I turn, that any of you are going to be able to kill me. Either I need to get myself in there, or someone needs to _put_ me in there.”

Daisy pauses, and Tim can almost hear her thoughts, quick and sharp, compared to the dull certainty in his head.

“I’m not giving you a safety net,” she says. Manages to turn her head far enough to level a stare at him, though her fingers start to twitch, almost imperceptibly. “I can’t. You know I can’t. If you turn, yeah. We’d do what we can, but there probably won’t be anything any of us can do to stop you. If you want to not be a monster, then–”

“Then I have to keep not being a monster,” Tim finishes. “I know, you said.” The repetition doesn’t make the advice any easier to follow. “But if I reach the point of no return, it’ll be too late. If I hurt Martin–”

“You aren’t there yet.” Daisy’s voice has turned harder, and he wishes he could share that surety.

“Maybe that’s why I should do it now. I can’t be a monster.” It’s not something he means to say, but honesty feels easier with Daisy. “Wells clearly thinks it’s inevitable, and if once I get there no one can make me–”

“No.” The word is almost a whip-crack. Tim would flinch from it, but instead it’s a sudden shock of understanding.

“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” he says. “Why you visit it. You’re clearly… afraid, of that thing. You’re getting a look at your other options, too. You need me not to be a monster so it’s easier for you to believe you won’t be.”

Daisy sighs, and her face turns slowly back towards the coffin again.

“Not just that,” she says. “Though it is a – a threat, I suppose. Sometimes. Sometimes, I can look at it as, I left that part of me in there, and I’m not letting it out again. Other times, it’s…” Her voice trails off, and he can see her, testing out the starts of sentences at the corner of his eye. “I know you don’t want to hear about him. But Jon climbed into that coffin to get me out. Before I went in, I’d decided to kill him. He still got me out. We _both_ got out. These things can be…” She hesitates again. “Braved, I guess. And you might even make it. Sometimes I just need the proof that I’m not still in there.”

“Does it still call you?”

“Yeah.” Daisy doesn’t hesitate, and he can feel her next question like a shiver up his spine before she asks it. “You?”

“It tries.” Tim drops his head to study the floorboards, eyes tracing the wood grain. “So I’m probably not like I was. I still feel like me. But I might not even see it when I’m not.”

“You’re not the only one looking,” she tells him. “Maybe if you explain to Martin and Jon how you’re feeling–”

“Hm,” Tim says. _Jon’s further along than me_, he thinks. _And Martin never wants to admit there’s a problem_. But it’s not fair, not when he hasn’t really tried, and he won’t say it.

“About Jon,” she says, and her decision not to engage with what he’s just said is audible. “I was trying to find you because he’s had one of his…”

“They’re not coming back,” she says. “The other monsters. Gone, he says. No more details, but you don’t have to worry about them anymore.”

“Just me, then,” Tim concludes. He should feel a wash of relief – there’s nothing more targeting Martin in particular than there ever had been – but the tightness behind his sternum won’t relax.

“Just _us_,” Daisy corrects. “You’re not that bad.” She taps Tim’s arm, then starts to get up again, manages to do it all without looking properly away from the coffin. “Why don’t you go and tell Martin the good news?”

“Later,” Tim says. Martin will be bright and pleased, and his head believes in that right now about as much as it does summer evenings in midwinter.

“Fine,” Daisy says. She’s starting to walk away now, out of even his peripheral vision. He hears the door open, a moment of pause over the threshold. “If you go in there, you’ll probably never come out again. Jon and I barely made it. If someone hadn’t left the tape recorders everywhere…”

“I know,” Tim says.

The door closes. He keeps his eyes on the coffin, and tries to see it the same ways she can. Tries to paste those carved words into his head, block of all the things he can’t go near. _DO NOT OPEN_.

If only it could be so easy.

* * *

The next time that Jon tries the safe room, there’s no Tim. Only Martin, sitting by himself on the bed, reading one of Tim’s thrillers. The irises, still in their vase, are starting to wilt, but all that means now is that flowers are an ephemeral thing, just as prone to dying as the rest of them. Jon doesn’t spare them much of a glance, their colour faded, brushing aside the faintest of thoughts that he should buy some fresh ones.

Martin puts the book down as he knocks, comes in, and doesn’t mark his place, so it must not exactly be a standout piece of fiction. Or maybe just not to Martin’s taste.

“Jon,” Martin says, with a tentative, uncertain smile. He’s looking a lot better, his hands no longer shaking, no grimace like it aches to move his limbs.

“You’re feeling better?” Jon asks, closing the door behind him. He considers locking it, and then dismisses the idea. It would feel too much like trying to trap Martin in with him. If Tim comes back, he comes back.

“Yes,” Martin says. “Fine. If you’re looking for Tim, Daisy already tried, he said he was going out–”

“No,” Jon says. “I… I wanted to talk to you. About Tim.”

“Oh.” Martin’s smile falters, slightly. Jon pretends he hasn’t seen it, and instead gestures towards the end of the bed.

“Do you mind if I…?”

“No,” Martin says, so he perches there. It’s uncomfortable, his back unsupported, can’t work out the right angle for his shoulders. Not intended for his purposes. “What about Tim?”

“I read the statement,” Jon says, picking at a stitch in one of the blankets. It’s intended as something to look at other than Martin, but he finds himself glancing up, completely aware of him anyway. “About the other people from the photo album.”

“The pall-bearers.” Martin’s voice is quiet, and the end of the word is almost cut off, with a minute shake of his head.

“According to the statement,” Jon says, with a blink at the unfamiliar name – it feels right, slots into place in his head, and he won’t question it. “It took days – less – for the resurrected person to become… like that. Until that point they were just the same as always. Martin… I want to ask if you think there’s any possibility that–”

“No,” Martin says, so sharp that Jon nearly flinches back. “No, Jon. Tim’s… _Tim_. He has been since he woke up, and he still is. He’s not taken this whole thing _well_, but, I’d be more worried if he had? He’s still himself.”

“And you’re sure?”

“I know,” Martin says, firmly, his hand falling back onto the thriller. “If that was everything–”

“So you’ve not noticed anything odd about him, at all?” Jon knows he has his answer, but he can’t seem to stop pressing, the uncertainty needling at his head. “Martin – I want to believe you, I really do, I’m just… worried.”

“There’s no need to be,” Martin tells him. “Before the pall-bearers came, yeah, things weren’t right. He was seeing things, feeling things, but they’re gone now.”

_Daisy told you?_ Jon doesn’t ask it, with another slight flicker of something that he doesn’t think is resentment. He’d been half-imagining telling Martin himself, had hoped he’d be relieved. It feels like a long time since he’s seen that expression on his face.

“And even then, I never felt like he wasn’t him,” Martin goes on, oblivious. “Aside from the dreams, it’s all the same as it was before the Unknowing. Except I think he might be feeling a little better? I don’t know, I hardly saw him before, but he smiles sometimes, and it’s–”

“The dreams?” Jon frowns, the blanket thread snapping off in his hand.

“Oh,” Martin says. “Yeah, we get them every night. I figured it was a Beholding thing? Like you get the dreams with the people whose statements you took. I took Tim’s statement, so–”

“It doesn’t happen with you,” Jon says. Martin gives him a confused glance, so he pushes on, trying to explain. “I don’t dream of you with Prentiss.” There was a time when he’d wanted to, when a part of him had thought that even seeing Martin crawling with silver worms would be better than never seeing him at all. “Or of Daisy with the coffin in the rain, or Melanie in the military hospital, or Basira in the warehouse, not anymore. I never dreamed of Sasha with Michael. Archival employees are exempt.”

“Oh.” Martin’s eyes widen, and he brings one of his hands up, pinching at the bridge of his nose. It’s not a gesture that Jon’s used to seeing from him, and he ducks his head slightly, trying to get a better read on his face. “So that means that…”

“Tim is no longer employed by the Institute,” Jon finishes. “His contract must have expired on his death, and he hasn’t signed a new one.”

“So he’s not stuck here anymore,” Martin concludes, voice muffled behind his arm. “He could leave.”

“Maybe,” Jon says. “I’m not… entirely clear on whether it’s the contract that keeps people here, or the Eye, but Daisy’s dreams stopped when she signed her contract.”

Martin’s hand drops away, at last, but his face is carefully unreadable, and Jon clamps down on the part of his brain that wants to skip past that and read him anyway. Not to his friends. Not to Martin. Never to Martin. Not if he ever wants to find a way forward with him.

“Do you think he’ll go?” he asks.

“Do you?” Jon says, hesitant. Martin should know better, after all. To his mind, surely Tim would want to stay, now that they’re together. It’s not as if _Martin_ can leave. “I know he wanted to go before, but things are… different, now.”

“He deserves a chance at a proper life,” Martin says. He’s starting to pick at the edge of his book in a way that makes Jon want to move it away before he damages it, used to hardbacks that could damage him right back. “He could get away from all of this. No more worrying about rituals or monsters. Maybe it would be easier for him to stay human if he wasn’t around all this.”

“It’s his decision to make,” Jon says, and he’s barely willing to let even that out. Tim, as the monster that he could so easily become, could do a lot of harm, out in the world. The Institute has a better chance of containing him than any police cell. But Tim, the person who had already given his life once – Martin’s right. He does deserve better. Normal. It never would have been an option for Jon – even without the bindings, that need to _know_ would always have dragged him along. But Tim had wanted out, had tried to get it. Now, he might succeed.

“Will you let me tell him?” Martin says, his voice a little too small. “I… I feel like…”

“Probably better coming from you,” Jon agrees. He hesitates, finding his mind struggling to pull itself back to the reason that he’d come here in the first place. “So, you’re sure he’s…?”

“Yes!” There’s a flash of annoyance in it now, though Martin cools it almost immediately. “Jon. I – I know you’re worried, but Tim’s not a monster. He’s not going to be a monster. You don’t have to keep watching him like that. Just… treat him like he’s Tim, please? Things are never going to get any better for the two of you if you don’t.”

“He doesn’t treat me like I’m Jon.” Jon doesn’t mean for it to sound how it does, isn’t even sure if it’s true, but it’s out, and he can’t take it back.

“Who Jon is changed,” Martin says, head angled fixedly down towards his thriller. “And he wasn’t here for a lot of it. Just try to give him the same consideration I do you, okay? He’s not a monster.”

_Not like you_, Jon fills in. Takes it as his cue to leave. Martin doesn’t call after him, just sits and stares at his book with that same, guarded expression.


	23. Chapter 23

It’s not much of a surprise, that Martin is acting weirdly. He’s been doing that, in one way or another, the whole time that Tim has known him. Even this particular brand of it isn’t new – he remembers this exact shade from the days when they’d been trying to prepare for that failed intervention with Jon. Martin had been all fluttering guilt, impossible for Tim to pin down and usher towards actual good sense.

Something is clearly bothering him, and it hadn’t been there that morning. Whatever it is, it must have turned up somewhere between Tim leaving for the coffin, and Martin getting back that evening, carrying a couple of pizza boxes. He’d gone out, which means that either Jon or one of the others must have told him about the monsters being gone. Tim had wanted to do that himself, but he’d decided an all clear was an all clear, and it wasn’t his place to resent where Martin’s had come from just because he’d wanted to be the bearer of good news.

Tim sits there for about an hour, watching as Martin considers his food like the mozzarella contains some dour secret to the universe, and eventually he can’t take it any longer. He leans over, taps at Martin’s wrist in an attempt to get his attention.

“Hey,” he says, trying to keep it light, friendly. “What’s wrong?”

“You don’t have to stay here.” Martin blurts it, and immediately drops the slice he wasn’t eating back into the box. It doesn’t look like he’d meant to do either thing, and he stares after the pizza like he’s fully aware that that’s the only one of the two he can recover.

“Afraid I do,” Tim says. “Real estate options are pretty limited at the moment, from the being officially and actually dead. You did say not to go mad with the card. And while Jon did offer me the key to his apartment, I thought that would probably be a bit weird, so–”

“I didn’t mean _in the safe room_,” Martin starts, and then what Tim had said seems to catch up with him, his jaw slackening. “He did?”

“Yeah,” Tim says. “When I was worried about– when I needed to be by myself, for a bit. Turned out it wasn’t an issue. Not necessary.” He casts a gauging glance at Martin. “Although, if you’re thinking of making the same offer, you might get a better outcome. It might be nice to have some more privacy.”

“No,” Martin says, and then his eyes widen. He shakes his head, hurries into a different response. “Not that you can’t – if you want to, you’re welcome, but I’m not talking about where you’re sleeping. I’m talking about the Institute. You don’t have to stay _here_.”

Tim leaves a long pause, letting the words sink in, trying to make sure that he’s heard them correctly. The sounds don’t change, no matter how long he gives it.

“I tried to leave before,” he says, eventually, and it’s hollow with the memory of that feeling, curled in his hotel room, starting to lose himself along with everything else. “I got sick.”

“I was talking to Jon,” Martin says, fidgeting at the edge of the pizza box. “And I mentioned the dreams. He says that they don’t happen to Archives staff. You’re not bound by your contract anymore, and I think that means you could leave. You could have a normal life.”

Tim waits for a pulse of pleased surprise. For the sensation of being trapped to fall away from him, to feel light for the first time in years. Nothing materialises. He isn’t surprised. Not even a little. He hadn’t known it before, exactly, but it feels like the information’s been knocking around his subconscious for a while, and he’s just not seen it directly. But now, it’s as visible as Danny on that stage, and he can’t keep ignoring it.

“You’d have to get some new information,” Martin is saying. “IDs, passport, that sort of thing. But once you’ve got that, you could go anywhere, be whatever you want to be. You don’t have to be stuck here with the rest of us.” He looks at Tim properly for the first time since he’d brought the food back, and there’s a sort of fevered desperation in his face. Tim can’t tell which way it’s supposed to be pushing him. “You can leave.”

Tim sits in silence for what feels like a long time. He can feel Martin watching him, trying to work out what he’s going to say. He can’t tell from his expression what he wants. _Ask me to stay_, he thinks, and half-wishes that Martin were Jon, just so that there would be some chance he might hear it. _Ask me to stay, and I will_.

It’s yet another thing on the list of stuff he can’t say to Martin. He’s supposed to have kept it casual, not-quite-friends with benefits. He’d always been able to manage that before, when he’d had to. He can’t ask him for more than that.

He doesn’t know how he got here, he thinks, trying to swallow a bubble of baffled laughter. Not with Martin, not with any of it. Once, away from the Institute and everyone in it had been all that he had ever wanted.

“How fast do you think you could get the paperwork sorted?” Tim asks, slowly. Martin’s face smooths over, and Tim can’t tell if it’s relief or dismay, if there’s anything behind it at all. He wants Jon there, his throat constricting with the need to know if there’s a single part of Martin that wants him there. If there are thoughts in Martin’s head that bow towards him like an ancient, wind-stunted tree, just as there are in his for Martin. That would be enough.

“I could probably get it done quite fast,” Martin admits. “Elias had a few... dubious contacts, and I’ve still got access to most of the Head of the Institute stuff.”

“Right,” Tim says. He pauses, tries again to judge what’s on Martin’s face. Nothing. Nothing he can pick out. “I’d – I’d like to be gone.” It’s true, he tells himself. He doesn’t want the Institute. He’d needed it for one thing, and Danny’s done now, as done as he can be when they’re back in the Theatre Royal every night. Even the End monster that had sat at his other side is gone now, the album safely returned to Artefact Storage. There’s no need to stick around and get himself embroiled in something else. He’d wanted out, and now he has it. It’s as simple as that. Martin has the others, and he has Jon, who likely still means more to him than Tim ever could.

“I’ll get it done for you,” Martin says. He clears his throat, involves himself in opening his pizza box again. “Where do you think you’ll go?”

“Anywhere,” Tim says. “Anywhere that isn’t here. Maybe somewhere warm. It’s…” It isn’t cold. Not really. He feels cold, sometimes, everything in his head that’s supposed to stay at room temperature cooling, and each time he catches it, there’s a rush of fear through his head that it’s the End. Maybe he’ll be able to find somewhere warm enough to melt that away.

“Sure,” Martin says. It sounds to Tim’s ears like wet cardboard being torn.

* * *

After that, it all seems to happen too fast. Martin sorts the papers so quickly that Tim wonders if he’d maybe started work on them the second he’d been brought back. When he’d handed over the thick, padded envelope, Tim had been half tempted to suggest that he’d missed his calling as a crime lord, but there’d been nothing on Martin’s face to imply that it had been a good time to joke with him, and Tim’s heart hadn’t been in it. He’d held onto the packet a moment too long, and then let go, tangling his hands into his sleeves as though in an attempt to stop him taking hold of them again.

It had all been in there, passport and plane ticket. Tim had stared at his own name, so numb that he almost hadn’t recognised it, the letters no longer corresponding to anything like meaning.

It feels like only a few hours, before Martin is insisting on coming to the airport with him, on carrying one of Tim’s bags as far as he can. It’s not a great distance, and not much to hold – most of Tim’s stuff is still at Martin’s, though he’d picked out what he wanted for the trip. Daisy had offered to come, too, and Jon had been hesitating around the issue right up until Tim had said goodbye to him – he doesn’t want a fuss.

He’d have preferred if Martin had stayed at the Institute, too, but he thinks that might be more to do with wanting to have said goodbye to him already. In his past rather than his present, where he’ll never have to go through it again.

They both just stand there, in the end, Tim with his bags and Martin almost distressingly unburdened, the airport blurring with people and the whir of their wheeled suitcases around them.

“You’ll let me know when you’ve landed safely?” Martin says. He’s staring at a point on the ground somewhere to the left of Tim’s shoe, an intersection between the floor tiles.

“Yeah,” Tim says. “Sure.” And that’ll be it, he supposes. Obligation ended. Maybe they’ll never see each other again. He doesn’t like how that idea makes him feel – his chest is still a thicket of confusion, the only certainty that now-barbed insistence that if Martin would just ask him to stay, he would.

Martin won’t. He’s been looking anywhere but at Tim since he’d made his decision, seems to have decided that there’s something endlessly fascinating about the airport’s architecture. Tim knows that there isn’t.

He tries to think, searching through his head for something to say. If there’s anything he can come up with, just to make it so it’s not so painfully silent between them anymore, those last traces of comfortable quiet long gone. He could ask Martin to let him know when he gets back to the Institute, but it feels too much, just prolonging the inevitable.

“I suppose this is goodbye, then?” Martin manages, finally. He manages to glance Tim’s way this time, only for an instant, but he’s still unreadable.

“I guess,” Tim says, and it’s sour on his tongue. “Maybe I’ll come back, when I’m ready.”

“No,” Martin says, too fast, too firm. “I don’t mean… I just think that, once you get out, you should stay out. You never wanted any of this, you didn’t like it, and I don’t want you to.” It sounds like there’s supposed to be more, like he’s just cut himself off halfway through a sentence, but nothing else comes out.

“Fine,” Tim says, more taut than he means it to be. He can’t quite swallow a pulse of something that wants to be anger, that hates the idea that it’ll just be one message to let Martin know he’d survived an _aeroplane_ of all things, and then nothing else, ever again. That they’re going to be cut off, after everything that had happened. “Goodbye, then.”

“Goodbye.” Martin manages a small smile, tries to pin it to his face, where it dies and is maintained like a macabre butterfly display. “I… I’m going to miss you.”

“Yeah,” Tim says. He doesn’t feel like he can try for anything more. An attempt at a sentence, a word with more than one syllable, and he might confess something he doesn’t want to. Reach for something more than Martin had been willing to give.

He reminds himself that he’d wanted this. Almost exactly this, when he’d taken that flight to Malaysia. Turn his back on the Institute, and never see any of them ever again. It hadn’t been that long ago, for him. He just has to push himself back into that headspace, remember that this is his second chance, and he just has to keep hold of it.

Martin’s picking at his sleeves again. Tim wants to grab his hands, wants to hug him, hold him so tightly that he’ll stop standing like he’d needed Tim’s bag as some sort of defence mechanism. He wants to kiss him, make it so that Martin won’t be able to forget the parting, and neither will he. He wants to make them the two halves of a couple, pining across an ocean and wondering if they see the same stars.

Instead, each of them stands where they are, a metre of floor between them, and neither going to cross it.

“Thanks,” Tim says, eventually. “For…” He doesn’t know what he means. The resurrection? The shiny new passport? Needlessly carrying his bag to the airport? “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Martin says. It’s more of an automatic, learned response than anything else. He meets Tim’s eyes again, but it’s even more fleeting than what he’d attempted before. “I’m sorry.”

Tim shrugs. He can’t say that it’s fine – he doesn’t even know what Martin’s apologising for. There are things he can’t and won’t forgive Martin, and something in him still insists that not asking him to stay is going to be one of them.

“It was… it was nice,” Martin says. It’s abrupt, stumbled over. “To have you back. I’m – I’m glad you were around.”

“Yeah,” Tim says again. His throat aches with trying to hold back what he wants to say, his phone buzzing before he can come up with something more suitable. The alert he’d set, to let himself know that he really should have checked in by now. “That’s time. I have to go now.”

“Sure,” Martin says. He makes one last attempt at a genuine smile, and Tim does his best to return it. “Bye, Tim.”

“Bye, Martin,” Tim says. He waits, for one long second, but Martin asks him nothing, and Tim can’t ask him to ask it. All he can do is turn and walk away from Martin, Jon, the Institute, everything he had ever learned to hate. His neck aches from not looking back.


	24. Chapter 24

Tim spends the whole flight waiting for the announcement that something’s gone wrong. His mind plays through the ground disappearing, and some sort of infestation in the hold that’ll soon riddle the entire plane, and a member of the cabin crew turning on the passengers with everything they have, listening to only the sound of the drumbeats in their head.

When they land with no issues, it takes him a long time to believe it. He wanders through disembarkation like he’s sleepwalking, just following the signs and showing his passport where he needs to. Toulouse-Blagnac Airport seems to be exactly as it should. The signs don’t purposefully lose him, he doesn’t suddenly round a corner to find the whole place completely deserted. There aren’t even any mundanely flickering lights.

He still can’t relax. Even with every step further from the Institute, he can’t believe he’s out. Keeps thinking that he’s being followed – notices a flash of a familiar coloured shirt in the reflections in the airport’s glass, before he reminds himself that this is the way out, and that everyone is probably going to be coming this way, nothing sinister about it.

That last text to Martin is the bare minimum. Tim sends it from a bus shelter, and tries to barely feel it – it’s less than one line, no emojis. _Arrived safely_. Still, that last full stop hits him like a punch to his gut. Never anything else, after that. No more gentle mornings or quiet evenings. He has to bundle all that up and leave it by the side of the road and not even think of coming back for it.

By the time that his coach pulls up, he’s almost convinced himself that he can do it. He chooses a window seat, turns his face into the warmth of the sun like a dog with its head pointed into the breeze, and decides that this is going to be his life now. It’ll be better. _He_’ll be better. He’s moving on.

Even so, he can’t stop himself from glancing sideways whenever someone goes past. He’s waiting for someone whose entire concept of personal space is based around violating it to take the seat next to him, someone whose skin doesn’t fit right or whose face is painted on.

There’s nothing like that. The coach just drives off, and Tim sets his bag down on the seat with no issues, pulls out his earphones and sticks them in on one side. He can’t focus on the music, though – he notices someone else from his flight, a few rows down, a man in a nondescript charcoal-coloured suit. His body language is all wrong, too stiff, and Tim’s expecting him to go wrong right up to the point where he pulls out a paper bag and starts retching into it. Just travel-sick. Not some sort of hellish monster assigned to make it so that he can never go back to the Institute.

He looks away. Not squeamish, but the sight isn’t particularly appealing. It would have been so much quicker, maybe even less unpleasant, if he’d taken Melanie up on her offer to ask Helen to drop him wherever. But he can’t get away from the supernatural by using supernatural means, even if it hadn’t been that sickening _door_. If he’s going to stay human, he’s going to do the things that humans do, and that’s it.

That means a long, slow, excruciating journey. The traffic away from the airport is thick, heat shimmering over the other vehicles, sitting in the coach despite the air conditioning’s plaintive whirring. He reminds himself that the warmth is just another sign that he’s away from the Institute, but it doesn’t stop his stomach tightening with every stop. There’s an expectation he can’t clear from his head that this next one will be unscheduled, will leave no survivors.

It doesn’t happen.

A girl gets on at one of them, takes the window seat opposite Tim’s. She offers him a smile when she notices him looking. She’s cute, a spark to her expression that’d been missing from Martin’s, and he tries to return a smile of his own. But he can’t really put his heart in it, given that he’d been checking her skin for any obvious seams. Eventually, she stops trying to catch his eye.

Maybe, he thinks, if he’d been feeling less like the next monster is going to be right around the corner. Perhaps a bit of idle flirting is exactly what he needs, to take his mind off everything, to get him to see strangers as people again rather than just potential horrors. If he’s going to get over Martin’s absence anytime soon, he needs to start exercising those muscles again. But his chest feels hollow, his tongue almost shrivelling at the prospect of saying anything to her at all.

She gets a book out, eventually, and starts to flip through it. Still manages the occasional glance up at him, though he turns to look solidly out of the window, rubbing a hand across his scars, the better to feel the irregularities in his own skin. He can still see every flicker of motion in the reflections, but none of them approach him, and he doesn’t turn his head.

She doesn’t look up for him, when she gets off and walks past, and he doesn’t try to get her attention either. Her seat is claimed by a man closer to middle-aged and very far away from Tim’s type. He tries not to let himself study him for long enough to pick up on any discrepancies in his appearance, instead making an effort to count the kilometres and minutes as they pass, work out their average speed. There’s no reason why there should be any monsters after him, and he can’t keep looking for them.

He should just be something to leave alone. Less bother as a human who wants nothing to do with any of it than as a potential monster who could make a dangerous enemy. Hopefully, he’s so far beneath the notice of the supernatural world that none of them are even doing that calculation. He’d like that. But being small and insignificant hadn’t helped Danny or Sasha or any of the other people whose stories sit in the Archives.

The coach rumbles out onto the main road, blaring into the countryside. The juncture startles Tim, and he digs his phone out to text Martin again, to let him know that there’s a golden retriever in the boot of the car alongside. Then he breathes out a long sigh, and deletes Martin’s contact details.

He spends the rest of the journey trying not to remember his number.

* * *

Martin doesn’t look around, when the tape recorder clicks on. He knows what he’ll see, and he doesn’t care to. Instead, he just turns off his phone screen, obscuring Tim’s last text from view, for all the good that’ll do. It’s probably all already been seen, along with every message neither of them had sent.

He still flinches, when the hands land on his shoulders, though he’d known it was coming, though it’s not the first time. The thumbs dig at his neck, prodding roughly at the muscle.

“You’re very tense, Martin,” Peter says, close to his ear. Martin can hear the smile in his voice, though he turns his face away, refusing to see it. He still knows exactly what it would look like, and that’s enough to set his skin crawling. “Don’t get so down – it was always going to end like this eventually. Didn’t I tell you?”

“Don’t touch me.” Martin tries to shrug him off, but Peter keeps his grip without any discernible effort, holding him in the chair. Maybe he doesn’t try as hard as he should, just a token protest, but he aches, and this has never been the worst of it.

“Honestly,” Peter says, with a sigh that’s as affected as all his other emotions. “If the others are just going to leave you feeling this bad, I’m not sure why you bother with them.”

“We had this conversation before,” Martin grinds out. In his head, the vague idea that he should grab for his phone sits, offered up by his clutching instincts, but there’s nothing he could do with it, no call for help that could change anything. “I’m not going to let you use me to end the world. Or, or change it, or whatever the Watcher’s Crown is supposed to _do_.”

“And that’s such a shame,” Peter says. He leans in closer, murmuring his next words into Martin’s hair, an uncomfortable warmth. “It would really have been nice to have you willing. But I suppose it’s all worked out for the best anyway, hasn’t it?” He inhales, long and deep, and Martin feels that fluttering urge to stand, to knock the chair back into Peter and get away from him. Get to Jon’s office, anywhere that there’s someone else. “You didn’t even tell him, did you?”

His hands shift, just so that his fingertips are touching skin now, and Martin flinches again. Still not enough to get free, not even enough to get Peter’s breath to stop tickling along his scalp. He should be used to that, by now. If he’s learnt anything in the last few months, it’s that Peter always comes back, that that last conversation where he’d refused everything he’d been offered was never going to be _it_.

“No,” Peter concludes. “You haven’t told any of them anything. Even when you’re trying not to, you still just end up here. Like this. I have to say, I’m really not sure where you’re getting all these ideas that this sort of thing isn’t going to happen. I mean, you’re–”

“I _know_,” Martin snaps the word out, can barely manage even that shoved syllable without having it break on him. He doesn’t need to be told how lonely he is. He can feel it, a gaping emptiness behind his ribs that had only grown with each blow – Sasha dying, Tim leaving, Jon avoiding him. None of them had seemed to want him back in the Archives, and he hadn’t known how to change that. Peter must feel it too – he’s probably breathing it in off him now, Martin’s isolation a bright thrill through his veins.

One of Peter’s fingers starts to run down along his spine, cold, and Martin doesn’t, _can’t_ think – there’s a bolt of panic, and he’s standing, hard, whirling around. But there’s no way out; Peter still far too near to get away from, blocking him in against his desk.

Peter takes a step closer, and Martin’s thoughts blink out like a house in a power cut. He reaches, and Martin scrabbles away so hard that the desk shifts. He nearly falls, stumbles out and away. Looks back to see Peter, holding his phone, watching him with one eyebrow raised.

“What are you doing?” Martin tries to demand, but any chance of force in his voice has been stolen.

Peter presses the button, and the screen bursts into life, all pretence of technological ineptitude long-since dropped, just another manipulation technique he doesn’t need anymore. He smiles down at the last message from Tim, and holds it up for Martin to see.

“Couldn’t wait to be out of here, could he?” he comments. “Off like a shot. I don’t know why you don’t go for someone a bit more committed.” There’s a faint smirk, over the top of the phone. “Or maybe it’s just you.”

“It wasn’t like that.” Martin’s words catch in his throat, and he hates them for it. “He got another chance.”

“Hm,” Peter says. “Maybe we shouldn’t bother him any further, then.” There’s a moment of quiet after he speaks, and then the screen of Martin’s phone starts to stutter. The pixels scratch themselves to pieces, speakers screaming, high-pitched enough that Martin clutches at his ears, half-sure they must be bleeding. Peter still stands there, unbothered, as the display flares with colours it’s not supposed to be able to use, then dims.

When it clears, the text – the entire message history, Tim’s number, all of it – is gone. Peter drops it back onto the desk. It doesn’t shatter, but Martin expects, his chest seizing, that it might as well have done.

“I’ve left you solitaire,” he says, leadingly, like he expects Martin to laugh at his joke. Martin doesn’t, and Peter gives his head a tiny shake, practiced disappointment, and then starts to circle around towards him. Martin moves away, manages a step further for every one Peter takes nearer. Inevitably, his back hits the wall, an abrupt impact that shakes lose the cold understanding that Peter is between him and the door.

He tries to think out a brief need for Helen, but she isn’t a telepath. There’s no handle when he reaches for one, and he knows, dully, that there won’t ever be.

Peter doesn’t stop until he’s far too close, flimsy millimetres the only thing between them. He brings up a hand, brushes his fingers against Martin’s cheek – Martin flinches again, wants, _needs_ to bring up his arm to knock that touch away, but he can’t. There’s nothing for his fear to do now but strangle him still as a trapped rabbit, knowing with agonising certainty that there’s no chance he won’t end up today’s meal.

“You really need to put more effort into your relationships if you want them to stick around,” he says, gripping Martin’s face harder, enough that there’ll be bruises, later. His smirk widens, and there’s a new noise – this one seems to be coming from inside Martin’s own head, a shrill, fraught resonance that feels like it will turn his bones to powder. He doubles over, aware enough of Peter’s hold on him shifting to try to wrench away, but he doesn’t have the strength. He’s pinned there, roiling nausea a counterpoint to the sharp pain of that sound.

When it finally fades, Peter drops him, leaves him to slump down onto the floor, still dazed. Better that way, he decides, wildly, dragging a fist across his face, up along his cheek, like he can wipe away the memory of Peter’s touch.

“Good luck finding anyone else to try it with, though,” Peter says, and favours Martin with the most genuine smile that he’s ever seen from him. “You might have a little trouble.” He steps back, with a last laughing glance, then turns and walks away. Fades out before he even leaves the room.

Left behind, Martin struggles to steady his breathing again, waiting for the last remnants of that blackboard-screech to clear from his skull. It passes, eventually, but the dread curling through his gut doesn’t. When he finally manages to stand, he tries to stumble to Jon’s office, his pulse thumping, enough that he wants to tell him everything.

All that he finds, no matter where he looks, is an empty Institute.


	25. Chapter 25

The river is steady and tranquil and beautiful, and all it seems to do for Tim is provide a contrast. He’d tried to believe it would be more, for as long as he could. As he’d passed under the high arches of the bridge, he’d told himself that he’d feel better, once he left the town behind. But he does, walls giving way to trees and bushes, and nothing changes for him.

On paper, it’s lovely. There are glimmering metallic blue dragonflies, dipping and darting over the water’s sun-glinting surface. Every now and again, one will land on his kayak, wings a delicate, iridescent stained glass against the plastic, and then take off again, zipping past his head. Below, he can make out the bright silver flashes of fish between the trailing weeds. It’s gorgeous, and he has it all to himself – outside of the school holidays, there’s barely anyone else out.

Martin would have loved it. Jon would have hated it. Tim pushes the thoughts away, with twin rough strokes of his paddle through the water. He’s not there to consider either of them. He’s there for the calm, to get caught up in the simplicity of it all. He’s there to be far away from everything else.

He’s even managing it, on all other scores. Nothing has tried to kill him, since he left. The digits of Martin’s phone number are finally starting to fade from his head. There hadn’t even been a Danny dream, the night before – perhaps distance from the Archives and Martin not being the Archivist had weakened the link of his statement. Tim doesn’t think much about it, doesn’t care. It’s not a gift horse he wants to look in the mouth, especially if it means that he doesn’t have to decide whether or not he’s still allowed to hold Martin’s hand there.

It just seems like it’ll take a little more time, to get his thoughts away as completely as he has his body.

He rests his paddle along the top of his kayak, and lets out a long sigh. Maybe he should have chosen somewhere with a little more white water, like he usually would have. Something to properly get the adrenaline pumping, force him to focus elsewhere. But he’s out of practice, and he’d wanted peace.

The first weir causes him no problems – the current’s slow enough that he barely has to fight not to crash into the nearest bank. It’s still pleasing, for that moment, the slight resistance against his arm as he turns the kayak, but then there’s a flash of brilliant blue from the undergrowth to his left, as a kingfisher takes flight. It lands on a branch, electric cyan and burning orange, and he immediately goes to point it out to Martin.

He drowns the impulse in the rushing sounds from the weir, and by the time he passes out of range of it, he could almost believe that he’d never had it. He brings the paddle to rest again, lets his splayed fingers trail through the water instead. It’s cool and clean and he tries to push that feeling through the rest of him. The quiet, he reminds himself, is nice.

The quiet is _supposed_ to be nice.

Further downstream, there’s another bird. This one is dark brown and white, bobbing up and down along the rocks, and then momentarily vanishing under the surface. Tim’s seen ones like it before. He always used to point them out to Danny when they were younger, on holiday. Those little up-down motions had always seemed so endearing.

It should be a good memory. A reminder of a happier time. Tim glares at the bird, steers further towards the bank than he needs to to avoid disturbing it, and it continues on with its life.

He’s not enjoying it. It isn’t making him feel better. That’s not going to change today. He knows, somewhere at the back of his head, that he could take this river as far as the sea and it wouldn’t make any difference. Even if he capsized his kayak, the water wouldn’t be able to fill that hollowness in his chest.

Perhaps tomorrow, he thinks, with a hope that most of him can’t believe in. Perhaps if he just spends more time out, he’ll get better at stopping his mind wandering. It’s barely been any time at all – only one night away from the Institute. It’ll get easier. It _has_ to get easier.

There’s a loud grating noise from behind him, and he starts so violently he nearly drops his paddle. A hornet, he tries to convince himself, craning around, but there’s no angry oversized flash of black and yellow. All that there is is the waterproof tub that contains the few things he’d brought with him – dry clothes, food, water, wallet, and phone.

The sound comes again, and this time he understands it – the vibration of an incoming call, rendered odd by its surroundings.

Tim reaches back, pulls the tub into his lap, and digs it out. The number isn’t one he recognises, and isn’t in his contacts, but all that means is that it isn’t Daisy, which narrows out one person from billions, presuming she’s not using someone else’s phone.

He should reject it. If it’s a telemarketer, someone with a list of numbers to ring that his had somehow found its way onto, he doesn’t want to talk to them. The only people who know he’s alive to want to contact him specifically are those at the Institute, and he doesn’t want to talk to them either. He had left them behind for a reason, and he can’t go back on it now.

He _will_ reject it, and then turn his phone off. If he needs it, he can always turn it back on again.

Decision made, he goes to swipe to reject, but instead finds himself doing the opposite, bringing the phone to his ear.

“Hello,” he says, functioning on autopilot, fighting against what feels like the same force from the dreams of the Theatre Royal.

“Tim?” It’s Jon’s voice. Tim nearly hangs up anyway, goes to do exactly that, before his mind picks over that word, and tells him there’s something wrong with it. Jon doesn’t sound like that. Not usually. The last time he’d been anywhere close had been when they were fleeing the worms. It’s not as controlled as it should be, the pitch way off Jon’s usual.

“Yeah,” Tim says, slowly, passing it around his mouth for longer than he needs to.

“Thank god,” Jon says, almost lost in the clatter as Tim reaches to put the tub back in its section. “Listen – you need to get back here, as soon as you can.”

“I’m not coming back,” Tim reminds him, letting himself be distracted by the noise of the next weir. This one has a canoe pass – he needs to make sure he approaches it at the right angle.

“I know you don’t want to,” Jon says, much too fast, and Tim recognises that uncomfortable note in his voice, with a prickle along the back of his neck – he’s _afraid_. “Martin said not to call you, and I know you deserve to have a real second chance, but I really need your help. Tim, please–”

“What’s going on?” Tim demands, sharper, unable to push away a pang of something in his own throat.

Jon hesitates, his breathing static down the line, too harsh, too quick.

“It’s Martin,” he says, and that on its own is enough to get Tim to dig his paddle in, jam himself against a rock, before he can lose the call amidst the weir’s rushing. “He’s gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?” Tim has to shout to be sure he’s being heard, his throat scratching with it. “Gone where?”

“I don’t _know_!” Jon snarls, abruptly aggressive, and Tim can hear the shape of his face in it, curling lips and glaring eyes. “If I knew where he was I could get him back myself.” He stops, hard, and there’s more of that breathing. He’s lost again, when he speaks next, the anger brief and burnt out. “Tim, just, come back? I – _he_ needs your help. Please.”

Tim ends the call, and reaches back to toss the phone back into the tub, then yanks his paddle out again. The rest of the river stretch passes quickly, and he doesn’t remember a single stroke of it.

* * *

* * *

Jon checks his watch for the third time that minute. Eleven seconds since his last glance. He curses himself and every moving part of the thing, gears and hands and battery, and doesn’t pause in his pacing. He keeps a rhythm of tight, tense strides past the magazine stand Daisy’s leaning up against, infuriatingly still, and tries to make it a little longer before he next looks.

“This is a waste of time,” he says. He nearly crashes hard into another traveller, and they shoot him an angry glare – he matches it with one of his own, and they quail, scurrying off before he can pick some detail out of their head to make them. “Tim’s not coming – we should be back at the Institute, looking for–”

“He’ll be here,” Daisy says, far too calm. She slots the magazine she was flipping through away, and starts to dig her phone out. “He said he was coming. He’ll come.”

The noise that Jon lets out in response doesn’t really resemble speech.

“His flight’s only just due in,” Daisy points out, gestures at the nearest information board without really looking at it. “I’m sure he’s on his way.”

“We should have left him to find his own way back.” Jon reaches for his phone, but his fingers don’t feel quite his own, clenched into fists too long, and it’s difficult to grip it. “I should call Melanie and Basira, maybe they’ve found something.”

“They said they’d let us know,” Daisy reminds him. She’s texting herself now, the motion much too smooth. “Best not to disturb them.”

“_Disturb them_?” Jon echoes, manages to wrench himself to a stop to properly stare at her. Finds the truth of it in his head like it had always been there. “Oh. _That_ was why you insisted on us coming to get Tim. The others think I’m a distraction.”

“_Don’t_ do that.” Daisy lowers her phone enough to give him a sharp look. “Calm down, okay? It’s not helping, you being… like this.”

“And how do you suggest I be?” Jon demands, tries to glare back but finds his own eyes hot and stinging. “Martin is gone, he could be… he could be… He’s gone.”

“Yeah,” Daisy says. “And we’ll find him. Which is easier if we’re thinking clearly.”

Jon glowers, starts to pace again, ignoring the set of Daisy’s eyebrows. He’s tried _thinking clearly_. He’s tried emptying all his own thoughts out, hoping something will come to him. He’s tried listening to Martin’s Prentiss statement, over and over, but it doesn’t help him see. Nothing works. His head’s so full of static that not even irrelevant facts have been willing to come to him, not about Martin. Everything else seems to be flooding in fine, though, enough to make him feel that hollow aching hunger in every breath.

Maybe that’s why he’s the first to notice Tim, picks him out of the crowd as soon as it starts flowing into the arrivals lounge. He doesn’t even really intend to look, too focussed on his movements and the storm of worry in his head, but he sees him all the same.

Tim is moving as fast as he can when stuck behind a steady flow of other people. He’s shouldering through with both bags, and from the wake of annoyance rippling out from his passing, he isn’t bothering to apologise, too busy with the next obstruction.

Jon starts towards him immediately, leaving Daisy to hurry after – she outpaces him within a couple of metres, but doesn’t overtake.

“Tim!” he shouts, loud enough to earn himself a venomous glance from another traveller. He ignores it, though the fact that they’d spent their whole workday surreptitiously playing video games floats obligingly into his mind right down to their high score. That doesn’t matter. What does is that Tim looks up, hears him, and wastes no time in shoving through the last few people between them.

He doesn’t smile, when he reaches them, his face set into those familiar angry lines, jaw clenched hard and eyes dark. There’s no slow of his pace, just a continued push towards the exit, clearly expecting them to walk with him and to keep up. They fall into step on either side of him, and Jon supposes that any pleasantries would just have been a pointless, unmeant effort.

“What happened?” Tim demands, with barely a glance at either of them.

“We think it happened after he got back from the airport,” Daisy explains, much too slowly for Jon. “He let us know you’d got away safely and said we should let you stay out of things. After that I was looking for him to ask him out for drinks, to celebrate, but I couldn’t find him. I thought he was probably just having some time to himself so I didn’t push it, but–”

“But I went to check on him the next morning and he wasn’t there,” Jon explains, faster, as though finishing the conversation will get them back to the Institute any sooner. “He wasn’t there and no one had seen him. He’s not at home – he’s not _anywhere_.”

“And you’re sure he hasn’t just gone out?” Tim doesn’t believe it – Jon can tell that even from just his face, let alone that he’d come all the way back.

“Try calling him,” Daisy says. “His phone is… just try it.”

Tim pulls his mobile out, and the brightness of the screen draws Jon’s eye – Martin’s number is already missing from his contact list, he notices, with a sharp twinge in his chest like it’s his own that’s been deleted. Not that his was ever in there in the first place. But Tim clearly remembers it well enough to type it in from memory, and he tries to smooth it over.

He presses the button to call, and holds the phone to his ear. Jon can hear it – the dial tone, normal at first, continuing on and on. Right up until that final note, twisting and distorting beyond all recognition. The answer machine message is long gone, the flat mechanical voice that had been there torn out and shredded into a noise that Jon knows from experience is like an orchestra being murdered. Tim jerks it an inch away from his face, and then presses it back, determined, listening for any information it can give him. It doesn’t – it ends, seven long seconds later. Tim’s screen gives an unhappy flicker, then steadies again.

“Right,” Tim says, trying to keep it steady, but his pace quickens, enough that Jon has to skip a step to avoid being left behind. “That’s not… but it _could_ just be his phone, maybe–”

“Something _took_ him,” Jon growls, unwilling to keep his patience with alternate explanations for what they all know happened.

“But you don’t have any idea what? No theories?”

“Not yet.” Daisy makes it to the door first, and reaches back to hold it open for Tim. He offers her a short nod on the way through, and that small familiar courtesy prickles through Jon’s head. “We’ve not seen anything new watching the Institute. There’s not been any ransom call.”

“Definitely not the…” Tim hesitates, covers it by turning his face away from them, reassessing his direction, searching for the next exit sign.

“No,” Jon says. He can fill in the rest of the question even with just his own human perception. “They’re gone, Tim. Not coming back.” That moment of certainty had been absolute, left no room for error. “We need to get back to the Institute and… and…”

“And then?” Tim prompts, and that slight aggression is like salt on a graze. Maybe he blames Jon. Maybe he’d be right to – while he’d still been there, he’d been protecting Martin with everything he had, as far as his own humanity. Jon should have been doing the same, and instead he’d just been giving him _space_. But, Tim had left. He’d had Martin and he’d _left_, and Jon can only find confusion where he’s sure there should be another sting of resentment. “Martin could already be–”

“I don’t think so,” Daisy interrupts, more loudly than she needs to, drowning out the possibility before Tim can give voice to it. “There was no body. Most of what’s out to get us would have left that, would have wanted it to upset us. There weren’t even any signs of a struggle.”

“Do you think it compelled him, then?” Tim pushes. Needs answers, just as Jon does, but none of them have anything to give him. “Like the coffin, or…”

“Maybe,” Daisy says. “Or maybe it was just too quick for him.”

Jon starts to drop back slightly, keeping half his attention on their theorising. There’s an ease to their conversation, something he hasn’t had with Tim for a long time, if he ever had, and his throat wants to ache at the sound of it. He shoves that away, as hard as he can. His own feelings about what he’d lost or never had with Tim aren’t important, not now. Nothing is, unless it gets Martin back alive.

* * *

It’s a bad sign, when Daisy goes to make the tea. Especially because she meets Tim’s eyes before she goes, and tips her head towards Jon, clearly indicating that he needs to talk to him. The drinks are just an excuse to leave them alone in Jon’s office, and the sound of the door closing somehow makes his heart sink even further.

Jon has been twitchy the whole way back to the Institute, and still is. He sits on the other side of his desk, and Tim can sense the fear radiating off him – it’s readable in every angle of his body language, every aborted and impatient tap against that drawer he keeps fidgeting at. It’s not anything like Martin’s had been, what feels like so long ago, no burst of pleasure that Tim needs to push down on, just an answering pang in his own chest.

He doesn’t say anything, and he does it loudly.

“What did you think I’d be able to do, then?” Tim says, the waiting ticking too long through his head. “Obviously I want to be here, but, you said you needed my help. I’m pretty out of the loop on stuff though, if it’s not the End, then I’m not sure I’d know where to–”

“Did anyone ever explain to you about anchors?” Jon’s staring down at his desk again, and he’s gone still so suddenly that Tim almost finds it more unsettling. He even seems to be holding his breath, no discernible rise and fall to his chest.

“No,” Tim says, slowly. He knows he could shove something blandly sarcastic in there, pretend he doesn’t care about any of it, but the idea of that falls flat before it can get anywhere near a reality.

Jon nods, and goes back to a quiet brimming with hesitation.

“They’re something that you… that you’re bound to,” he says, eventually, and Tim could have raised paragraphs in the pauses between his words. “Something you can find your way back to.”

“Right,” Tim says, because Jon has stopped, properly this time, his eyes flickering momentarily up to Tim, like he’s trying to test how he’s taking it, and he doesn’t have anything else he can go to.

“It’s something you’re attached to,” Jon goes on, cadence near-painfully difficult. “Sentimentally. It… helps you out of whatever you’re stuck in. The… the woman in Genoa? With the faceless crowd? She got out by thinking about her mother. There was another one, while… while you were gone. A man who survived by holding a totem of his father. When I went into the coffin after Daisy, I needed an anchor so that I could find my way out.”

“And that was Martin?” Tim concludes, goes to make an effort to pull the bitterness from his voice, only to find that there isn’t any there.

“What?” Jon frowns, his attention drifting as far as the edge of the desk closest to Tim. “No, no, I… used one of my ribs.”

“You _what_?” Tim echoes, can’t keep himself from it. “And that worked, did it? No offence, boss, but you’re about as sentimentally attached to your body as a lemming.”

“It _seemed_ like it was working,” Jon says, and there’s a hint of defensiveness in it. “At the end, I think the tape recorders were doing it as well–”

Tim makes a noise of pointed incredulity, in the back of his throat.

“But whatever it ended up being,” Jon says, pushing on through it. Then he seems to freeze again, back suddenly far too straight. “It works. And I thought that… look, I… I didn’t mean to, but I saw you. With Martin. I know you were together. I… I didn’t say anything because I assumed you didn’t want anyone to know, although you really could have chosen more of a private place to do it, it’s not as if the Archives are _deserted_–”

“We weren’t together,” Tim interrupts, flat, with no attempt to hide it.

Jon looks at him, finally. Blinks in bafflement, knocked from his course and with no idea how to get back to it.

“I saw you kissing,” he says, and all that confusion is diffused into his voice as well. “Tim, I know I don’t really engage in those sorts of discussions with you, but I do know what that means.”

“It was just sex,” Tim tells him. It tastes like a lie, sits on his tongue like ash, but no matter what he’d wanted, by the end, it’s the fact he has to stick to. “If you were thinking we had some sort of great romantic connection that’ll span across space and time and mean I can find him – I’m sorry. Of course I wish I could, but it wasn’t that. We were just trying to make things a bit less shit. You’ve got a better chance of it yourself.”

“No,” Jon says, shaking his head, far too vehement, insisting. “No, you – your _faces_… No. Martin and I haven’t been – we’ve barely spoken since I woke up from the coma. We haven’t got any sort of a connection. And maybe you think it was just sex, but that’s still more than I’d ever be able to give him. I… I wouldn’t be able to connect with him like _that_, I don’t–”

“Martin doesn’t care about _that_,” Tim says, waves it away, a distraction. “Well, he – he _enjoyed_ it, of course he did, but… You’re the one he’s in love with.”

Jon’s frown deepens even further, stares at Tim, the human equivalent of an internal server error.

“But you love him,” he says, after a few seconds. Sounds as lost as he looks.

“Don’t look in my head,” Tim snaps, because anger is the easiest, fastest reaction to hearing someone else word something he had never been able to. It burns quick and bright, fuelled by the idea that if he _had_ said it, if he had just _stayed_, maybe, maybe. Then it burns out, and all there is is Jon flinching back, dismayed for a moment before his face falls into a new, almost unfamiliar slackness. “Look, it doesn’t matter what I feel, we didn’t have–”

Jon stands from his chair, so suddenly that it falls behind him, strikes the floorboards with a clatter hard enough to cut Tim off. He circles around to the door, doesn’t wait. Just yanks it open and walks out, leaving Tim to scramble after him, refusing to be left behind. He almost crashes into Daisy, just coming in, carrying a tray with three mugs, but manages to dodge around in time, is vaguely aware of her setting them down and following.

They don’t go far – just to Martin’s desk. Jon stops in front of it, then leans down to yank at one of the drawers. It doesn’t budge, clearly locked, but he doesn’t take his hand off it.

“Here,” he says.

Tim leaves him there, resting his fingers against a handle he can’t move, and starts to root through his rucksack, left leaning up against his old desk. He finds what he’s looking for almost immediately – a set of lock picks, kept in the front where he would have had keys. Sasha had got them for him, a long time ago, before the Archives, so he could prove he could do it. They’d still been sitting in Martin’s box of his things, and he hadn’t had the heart to leave them.

He retrieves them, and goes back to Jon, gesturing for him to move. It takes him a long moment, but he sees the slim black wallet in Tim’s hand, and steps back only just enough to give him the room he needs.

Tim crouches, and gets to work with tension wrench and pick. It’s not a complex lock, and he makes short work of it, pins pushed into place within a couple of minutes. When he pulls at the drawer himself, it opens smoothly, revealing a large padded envelope, the edges crinkled up to fit the space. It has Jon’s name on it, so he hands it over.

“Hidden talents?” Daisy comments, and Tim shoots her an unfelt grin.

“Race you sometime,” he says, but it trails off, as he notices something left behind in the drawer – a cassette, glinting black in the Archives’ dull light. He pulls it out, straightens, ready to pass that to Jon too, but he’s already holding one, and when he angles the envelope towards Tim, he can see that it’s full of them.

Jon puts it down on the desk, and Tim tries not to look for too long at Martin’s faded handwriting. Instead, he watches as Jon pulls a recorder from the mess of papers on the surface without looking for it. Like it had always been there, like he’s always known where to find it. He picks a tape, and slots it in.

By the time he presses play, it’s the only thing that Tim can focus on.


	26. Chapter 26

For the first few seconds, all Tim can hear is breathing. There’s a momentary, stupid impulse to seize on it, take it as proof of life, but that only lasts the fraction of a second it takes for the reality of the nature of recordings to quash it. It’s not evidence of anything, except that once, at some unknown point, Martin had been alive, and Tim already knows that.

“Jon,” Martin says. He’s whispering into the recorder, struggling to keep it quiet, anything pitched higher immediately stifled. “It’s – it’s not like I thought it was. None of it’s been about stopping the Extinction, not properly. It’s just – just a distraction. Something to keep me reading the statements, so I stay with the Beholding enough that when the Watcher’s Crown comes around he can use me. Bring the Lonely through too.” He hesitates, and Tim can picture him, hunched over the recorder, glancing around with wide eyes. Seeing nothing, leaning back in, but still not quite able to relax. “He’s been trying to hide it, but the spreadsheets aren’t quite right, and then I had this thought, and… I can’t. I can’t go through with this. He doesn’t know I know yet, but… he’s going to find out. I mean, I can’t keep working with him, not if it’s going to lead to _that_. I’ve got to go back to the Archives. Jon – I’m coming back.” There’s a faint sound of fingers on keyboard, and when Martin talks again, he’s more distant. “I just have to make sure I can still get into the system, or he’s just going to keep vanishing anyone who has a problem.”

There’s a clunk as the recording clicks off, and in the pause, Tim shoots a glance at Jon – he’s frowning down at the turning reels, all his attention on them.

“The Extinction?” Tim prompts. He doesn’t like how it feels in his mouth, even less the sound of it.

“No idea,” Jon says, still without looking up. “I know one of Gertrude’s associates was theorising about a new entity, but I… I didn’t know it had got this far.”

There’s another click, effectively silencing any chance of further discussion. They cut back to Martin, halfway through the sound of laughter – Tim doesn’t recognise the voice, but he does the recorder’s wailing static, scratched and shuddered through from Martin’s answer machine. He sits hard into one of the chairs, vaguely aware of Jon carefully taking one beside him.

“I would have thought that you would be thinking a bit bigger by now.” It’s unfamiliar, and from the lack of anything in Jon or Daisy’s expressions, they don’t know it either. “You do remember that we’re talking about saving the world, right?”

“No, we’re talking about ending it a different way.” Martin’s as firm as Tim has ever heard him. “I’m going back to the Archives. I’ve already filed the paperwork. I’m not going to change my mind, Peter.”

“So you’ve told me,” Peter – _Peter Lukas_ – says. “But really, it’s just a couple of floors – what exactly do you think that distance is going to achieve? It doesn’t matter if you’re up here or down there. I’ll come and get you when I need you. I don’t really care if you’re willing or not.”

Martin says something else, but it’s indistinct, lost in the crash as he scoops the recorder up. Tim can make out footsteps, a door slamming, and then it’s gone again.

The next section is better – Tim can place it in the Archives, the sound of the kettle boiling clear in the background.

“I guess,” Martin says, into the recorder. Clearly intentional, this time. Something he’d meant for Jon at least to find. “If you ever hear these, it’ll be because it all went wrong and I couldn’t tell you in person. He… he didn’t stop me, but he’s not that worried, either. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. That I haven’t.”

There’s another double-click, and this time, there’s no monologue to the machine. Just the sounds of pages turning – Martin’s leafing through a statement, Tim decides. It’s almost peaceful, until that distinctive, screaming static cuts through it all again. It’s so loud that it takes Tim a long time to reach the cold, heavy realisation that Martin doesn’t hear it, has no warning.

“No drinks with the others tonight?” Peter Lukas’ sympathy is utterly artificial, so obviously that it makes Tim’s teeth itch. “Did they not invite you?”

“Go away,” Martin says. It’s clear, loud, like he hasn’t even turned to face the threat. Tim wills him to, wills him to smash the device into Peter’s face and run, but there’s nothing he can do to make him. This is all past and it doesn’t matter how hard he digs his fingernails into his palms.

“They don’t trust you,” Peter goes on. “But you don’t blame them for that, do you? It’s not as if they’re wrong. You’re still keeping a lot from them.”

“Go away,” Martin repeats, with no change to his cadence. Tim wonders, his hands starting to ache, if this is the first time it’s happened. He doubts it.

“So you say,” Peter says. “But you’re really not doing much to discourage me.” His voice grows a little louder, and then Tim can hear him inhaling, near and distinct. “All that _loneliness_, Martin, really.”

“Get away from me.” There’s the slightest of wobbles there, for the first time, and Tim feels his jaw clench, so hard that he’s half-convinced he’s going to drive his teeth down into the bone, crack them.

Between the clicks that take them into the next recording, Jon reaches out and takes Tim’s hand. His skin is cool, or Tim’s is too hot. There’s no force to it, the hesitation so strong that his touch might drift away. Tim holds him back, doesn’t think about it. He doesn’t have the space in his head. It finds a place in his chest, all the same.

Peter Lukas is already there, this time – Tim can feel his presence in the silence, even without the static, even before Martin’s stifled, startled breath.

“Martin,” he says, and Tim’s skin crawls at the tone of it. “I’ve been missing you, upstairs.”

“No,” Martin says. “You haven’t. You’re perfectly capable of doing everything that Elias’ job requires, so–”

“_No_,” Peter says, pushing now. “I’m missing _you_. I think I might take you back with me. No one round here to stop me tonight, after all. Where did they go this time? Do you even _know_?”

Jon’s grip tightens, and Tim wants to risk a glance at his face. Can’t, too caught in the quiet turn of the recorder.

Next, another snapshot – Martin’s breathing, and, just on the edge of audible, pulses of that static. Peter’s voice, muffled, calling for Martin in a different room. Each time, Martin goes completely still, completely silent. Hiding, Tim realises, skull throbbing.

The scene changes, and this time, at least, Martin seems to be alone – he sounds shaky, voice trembling, but at least it’s at a normal volume.

“Peter’s just toying with me now,” he’s saying. “Just getting as much fear out of me as he can before… Before. I don’t know what to say to the others – I can hardly make them like me to stop the world ending, can I? Jon’s avoiding me. I can’t blame him, I mean, it’s not like I was there for him, is it? Basira and Melanie – I just ran off, when the Flesh attacked. I wouldn’t want me around either. And Daisy, god, after what I said to her…” He exhales, and it hitches halfway through, like he’s trying to smooth out a sob. “I should never have gone to him, or– or answered his call at the hospital. I don’t know if that would’ve helped. He… he probably would have taken me anyway. It’s not like I’ve not lost everyone. Sasha, and– and Tim. They’re gone.” He pauses again, and this time there’s a noise like sellotape being pulled from the dispenser. “I saw this Leitner, a while ago. In the Artefact Storage manifests. They didn’t stop me checking it out? I shouldn’t, but… He’s just going to keep coming. I need to be less like he wants me to be, and – and I miss them _so much_.”

The shape of this static is different – it’s less pitchy than Peter’s, doesn’t try to split Tim’s skull in half. He’s heard it before, he thinks. Can’t place it.

“Tim,” Martin whispers, and it’s soft, reverent. The safe room, Tim thinks, the moments before he’d woken up. That look on Martin’s face.

The recording ends, and it should stay ended. He’d been back, then. Less loneliness for Peter to come sniffing after. He’d been there and Martin had been safe and they had been together, even if it hadn’t been in the way he’d come to want.

Instead, there’s another of those hated clicks.

“He hates you.” Peter again, learned cheerfulness. Tim thinks it’s even meant to be genuine. “I’d be curious to know what you thought was actually going to happen. This is really better than I could have imagined. I’m very glad I waited.”

“Leave me alone,” Martin says, but it doesn’t have a patch on his earlier efforts.

“Gladly,” Peter says, but Tim hears his footsteps, moving closer. Martin pushing his chair out, and then what might be a hand, taking a fistful of fabric. A slight knock, perhaps a start against the desk. “But you’ll still know I’m here, won’t you?”

The recording clicks off before the static can really get started, but Tim still feels every broken note of it in his chest.

* * *

Jon changes the tape over one-handed. He’s not sure he could get out of Tim’s grip, even if he’d wanted to, and he doesn’t. Needs the contact as badly as Tim does, the warmth of his touch a single solid, grounding point.

“Peter’s right,” Martin says, in the new recording, and the sound of his voice aches through Jon’s head. Gone now. Taken. “He does hate me. I shouldn’t have lied to him – I shouldn’t _still_ be lying to him, or any of them, but– but I can’t tell them the truth, can I? If Tim knows any of this he’s only going to stay around me because he doesn’t want the world to end. And if that’s the only reason then it’s hardly going to make me feel any less lonely, is it? So Peter would still be able to use me.”

Tim flinches, and Jon gives his hand what he hopes is a comforting squeeze, tries to catch his eye, offer something sympathetic, but Tim doesn’t look at him, and then the tape switches again.

By this time, he’s almost inured to Peter Lukas’ static. Doesn’t wince at it, though the pitch collects, heavy in the pit of his stomach.

“Go away.” The hitch in Martin’s voice seems to take up more space than the words, and Jon closes his eyes. He sounds weak, almost blurring out. “I’m not… Tim’s coming back.”

“Is that any way to talk to your saviour?” Peter’s tone is all light, gentle reprimand, but Jon can feel the bulk of the threat in it all the same. “I’d have thought better of you.”

“What are you talking about?” There’s no force in it.

“Well.” Peter pauses, and Jon can almost picture him gesturing, wide and all-encompassing, a monster he’s never even seen. “The pall-bearers. I dealt with them. The End can be difficult. Not particularly bothered by tricks like your Archivist’s. But, every monster needs to feed what feeds them. So all I had to do was take them, and put them somewhere where there’s no one for them to eat, and voila. One of them’s started withering already.”

“Why would you do that?” There’s a spike in Martin’s question, one he’s tried to smooth over, but it’s still all too present.

There’s a familiar creak of mattress – this must be in the safe room, Jon realises, after the other End monsters had left. The noise, he knows, was Peter, sitting down on the edge of the bed, like he’s kindly visiting an ailing Martin. He doesn’t dare open his eyes, look towards Tim. He doubts he’d see anything there that he’d like.

“I noticed that they had some rather unsavoury plans for you,” Peter says. “It was really quite difficult not to notice, though I’m sure I’m not quite as astute as Elias. And, as I’ve told you, I have some plans of my own.”

There’s a dull thump – Martin trying to scramble to his feet, Jon decides, but there’s heavier thud against the mattress a moment later, as though he’s fallen back down onto it. Just that he’s not strong enough to stand up, Jon hopes, but it doesn’t make it as far into his head as the idea that Peter had pulled him.

“Those plans just don’t work very well,” Peter goes on. “If you’ve had the life drained out of you. So I fixed it. And I have to say, I’m not sure that you’re appropriately grateful. I saved your life, probably Daisy’s too. And the humanity of your precious Tim. I think I deserve a little better than this.”

The recording finishes before Jon can end it himself, far too close to striking at the recorder, anything to make it stop. He remembers walking in, finding Martin sitting on the floor, looking like he’d been crying. He’d let Martin pass it off as just not yet being able to stand, hadn’t pushed, hadn’t pressed. He should’ve. Maybe he’d missed Peter Lukas by mere seconds. Doesn’t know what he’d have done, but it would’ve been better than _nothing_.

Tim passes him the cassette that had been loose in the drawer, and Jon plays it. They listen. The recording spits with static, but it’s still all too easy to make out what Peter says to Martin, about them, about him. That last comment, before it distorts until it’s impossible to understand anymore. _Good luck finding anyone else_.

The tape ends, but Jon can still feel something, a low, barely-discernible crackle that’s not unlike the background of the recording. It’s more of a sensation than a sound, though, prickling in the air, across his skin. He glances over at Daisy, trying to tell if she’s getting it too, but she’s not looking at him. Instead, all her attention is focussed on Tim, one cautious hand held out towards him.

“Tim,” she says, measured and careful. “Calm down.”

_Tim_. When Jon looks, he can almost see it, the tension pulling towards him, gathering clouds before a lightning strike.

“He _took_ him.” It’s barely above a growl, so rough that Jon almost doesn’t recognise it. “He’s in the building somewhere. I can end him. I’m not losing anyone else.” His grip on Jon’s hand has turned bruising, knuckles pressed painfully together.

“You can’t,” Jon says, working to extract his fingers. “If you kill him before we get Martin back, he might be trapped.”

Daisy shoots him a sharp glance, and he stops trying, does what he can to lean back in his chair, disengage. Not helpful, apparently.

“Even then, you can’t,” she says. “Remember what we talked about? You need to stay human. You don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“I want to hurt _him_,” Tim’s voice is hardly shy of a snarl, raises the hair on the back of Jon’s neck. “I _can_ hurt him.”

“Okay,” Daisy says, moving a little closer, trying to put herself in Tim’s field of vision, still fixed unerringly on the recorder, the last trace of Martin they have. “But you don’t want to hurt me. You don’t want to hurt Jon, or Basira, or Melanie. Or Martin. If you can’t control yourself, that’s who you’re going to hurt. Breathe.”

“Martin won’t want to come back to a monster,” Jon murmurs. It feels like it’s been sitting in his chest a long time, waiting to be given the legitimacy of sound. _Jon’s avoiding me_. He had been. Hadn’t meant it like that, had meant it to be space and time that Martin would cross when he was ready. Had just assumed that Martin would reach out when he needed more, had never thought he’d find any other meaning in Jon’s silence.

Tim closes his eyes, and the pressure in the air slowly starts to fade out again.

“Good,” Daisy says, still level, still calm, but she’s rattled. Jon can see it in her face, the way her hands have been forced out of fists. Maybe she’s seeing Tim as her future, an inevitable loss of control, one moment of storm that could bring carnage on levels they won’t recover from. A return to what she’d been before the coffin, and never wants to be again.

Tim’s grip on Jon slackens again, and Jon withdraws with a last brush of their fingers. The feeling floods back with a sensation like pins, and he winces at the discomfort. He leans back in his chair, inhales, and then freezes, the air sitting, caught in his lungs.

“I… I know where Martin is,” he says, slow and half-believing. He climbs to his feet, hardly daring to think of it in case it vanishes under the scrutiny, intricate ice crystals melting under a photographer’s light. He starts to walk, vaguely aware of Tim and Daisy following after him.

It’s not far, before he stops. Outside the safe room, the location settling in his head. Of course Martin would be there. It’s where he’d been hidden from Prentiss for months before she’d attacked the Institute, an illusion of security. Where he’d been with Tim, likely the closest he can get to him, now.

Peter Lukas probably enjoys that, Jon realises, with an almost painful twist of nausea.

The room beyond is empty. He should never have expected otherwise, though he still feels that crushed sensation in his chest, enough to tell him that he had. Martin might well be in the safe room, _is_ in the safe room, but he’s still not quite in the same place as them. Still trapped somewhere they aren’t.

Jon can picture him. Sitting on the bed, flinching at every creak of the building settling, hoping it won’t be the footsteps of the monster that Jon had overlooked. Barely a metre away, and with no way of knowing that they’re there.

* * *

Tim barely leaves the safe room after that. Won’t, if he can help it – if Martin’s there, then that’s where he has to be, too. Even if they aren’t on the same plane of existence, even if there are untold dimensions between them. He won’t abandon him again, even if it’s all symbolic anyway.

Jon brings him some statements to go through, ones that mention Peter Lukas or the Tundra, seems to think that more information will help them. Tim doubts it – he already knows everything he needs to. Peter Lukas took Martin, and he’s going to use him to end the world. His greatest weakness won’t be listed in any story he’s let them keep.

He reads through them anyway. There’s nothing else for him to do, no other, better ideas. On the rare occasions that he leaves the room, to eat or drink or use the bathroom, he can usually hear Jon’s voice, reading out a litany of misfortunes to the tape. Another former Tundra crew member, a dog walker who had found a body washed up, the owner of a dockside bar in Southampton – little puzzle pieces that don’t even come close to building the picture of what Tim had heard on Martin’s cassettes.

He doesn’t record his. Won’t even give voice to them, which is why, when he finds the recorder on the safe room’s pillow, he knows he didn’t put it there. It doesn’t surprise him, not even the barest flicker of it – he knows they just turn up, sometimes. Usually around Jon.

It’s running, but he can’t see anything there that it might be interested in. There keeps being nothing, even when he looks up ten minutes later from his file, and gives it the best glare that he can muster.

“I’m not reading it to you,” he says. “Try your luck with Jon.”

The machine’s only answer is to keep recording. No privacy, Tim thinks. There hadn’t been before the Unknowing, and there isn’t now. Every little detail, exactly recorded on magnetic tape. It wants everything they’re afraid to give it.

He tries to turn it off manually, an angry stab at the button, but it clicks back into place again, unconcerned. He stops it, plays it back, wondering for a moment if it might be picking up something from Martin’s side, but all he can hear is his own voice, echoing back out at him. Then it keeps recording, even when he drops it back onto the bed beside him as hard as he can.

“You could at least pull your weight,” he says. “Do you really want to share your apocalypse? You let Jon know where to find the tapes.” He’s heard all of them now, but there was nothing to help with the current situation, just whisperings of the Extinction, the occasional detail of a deal that Martin had backed out of. “Give us something else.”

The recorder doesn’t answer. It doesn’t give a damn about Martin, Tim knows. Not about any of them. Jon’s the only one that matters to it, and even then, it’s not really _him_. It’s the Archivist it wants. It wouldn’t care if everything that was Jon was left by the wayside in a fleeting grab for that monster, and he hates it for it. Hates it for everything.

He scratches at his throat, and watches as the spools in the cassette continue to wind, making careful note of his silence. If he leant closer, anyone listening would be able to hear his breathing, like he had Martin’s. He wonders if Martin had known how much of what was happening was being recorded – _some_ of it had clearly been intentional. There had been tapes explicitly addressed to Jon. Even if he hadn’t been the one to put it there, that last one had only included his abduction.

Tim pauses, halfway through turning over the page of the statement, fingers stilling. It had included the _entirety_ of his abduction. Moments _after_ Martin had been dragged into the Lonely. The tape recorders still work there. He may still have access to them.

He picks the device up again, still half-considering hurling it into the wall, as hard as possible. Instead, he brings it a little closer, near enough to talk into it gently.

“Martin,” he says, careful and cautious. It feels like it makes a fool of him, but he pushes on. “If you’re hearing this – come back. If you can.” He bites his lips closed, swallows a curse. No need to tell him to want what he probably already does. If Martin could have made it back, he would have. He doesn’t have the option – they’d heard him make his choice, and they’d heard Peter Lukas laugh about it. “Jon… Jon was telling me about anchors. He thought maybe I’d be able to find my way to you, and – _god_, Martin, I wish I could.” He hesitates, lets out a long, whooshing breath. Closes the statement, lets it drop onto the floor. “I would have stayed. If you had just _asked_. Maybe you know that, that’s why you didn’t – you seemed so invested in me getting out? But I wish you had. I missed you – I still miss you. Do you understand that– of course you do. You got stolen by a loneliness monster.” He picks at the sheet, snapping threads. “You should have told me. Or not even me, Jon, anyone. I don’t know what we would’ve done, but we would’ve done _something_. I wouldn’t have left you. And it wouldn’t have been to stop the world ending. It would have been because I want to be with you, all right? So you can forget all that. I’m here. I’m as close as I can get, and maybe that’s not close enough, but – but you don’t have to be lonely anymore.”

It’s a lot, to say it all like that. He grimaces, half-certain that he’s just done something stupid, that if the Eye had the capacity to laugh at his expense, it would be doing it hard enough to shake galaxies.

This time, when he turns the recorder off, it stays that way. He pulls out the cassette, digs around until he finds a marker, and then writes Martin’s name on the label. Leaves it on the box at the bedside, in the hope that it might somehow find its way to him, to whatever stifled variation on the Archives Martin has been consigned to.

He settles on the floor, to read through the next statement. The bed doesn’t feel quite right on his own, the shape of the mattress all wrong without the dips that Martin leaves in it. He can’t concentrate even there, though, his mind skipping over sentences until he can’t even remember how the story had started.

His mind sticks, on what else had been in the box with the markers – a whole new pack of cassettes, blank and waiting to be filled.


	27. Chapter 27

By the time that there’s a knock at the safe room’s door, there are three tapes, sitting and waiting for Martin to hear them. Tim hasn’t filled them, not properly – they’re mostly silence, the occasional rambling monologue. Things he would have wanted to say to Martin, to anyone. Snatches of complaints about how useless the statements are, muttering about whatever foolish decision their narrators had made. He’d tried playing them back again a couple of times, in case they had managed to unspool across the dimensions after all, but it had always just been him.

“Come in,” Tim says, but it’s lost in the sound of the door opening, as the person lets themselves in anyway. He doesn’t bother to turn.

“You okay?” Daisy. Of course, Daisy. It was only ever going to be a matter of time before she came to talk to him, after how she’d looked at him after they’d heard the tape of Martin being taken, what he’d wanted to do, what he’d nearly tried to do. He hadn’t thought that she was going to leave him alone, but she’d followed Jon when he’d left, with one last troubled glance back at him.

“Just fine,” Tim says, flat as a broken clarinet. “The man I– my– _Martin_ has been taken and we’ve got no idea how to get him back. Why would I not be fine? But I’m not about to go all undead rampage on the good people of London, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Hm,” Daisy says. Doesn’t even comment on the sarcasm, just circles round, into his field of vision. She’s not even really looking at him, studying the boxes, instead. “What’s in these?”

“Mostly statements,” Tim says, with half a shrug. “We were working on sorting them into the rest of the Archives, but there’s still a lot in here. Statements and office supplies. There might still be a few fire extinguishers knocking about.” He doesn’t expand, in no mood to explain, to take himself back to those lightheaded minutes, knocking through the wall, when he’d thought worms were the worst thing they’d ever have to deal with.

“We’ll need to move them,” she says. Doesn’t ask, just leans down and pulls a box towards her, hefts it with a rattle of marker pens. “We’ll need the space.” She glances over at him, waiting for a question he doesn’t care to give, her face drawn. “I’ve talked to the people in Artefact Storage. They’ve agreed to transfer the coffin here, temporarily.” _Talked to_ probably means _vaguely menaced until they gave in_, Tim assumes, but that still doesn’t draw any sense from the rest of it.

“The coffin?” he echoes, but even the surprise doesn’t change the set of his face. “I know I complained about the lack of furniture in here, but I’m not sure this is the time to sort it.”

“No,” Daisy says, steady and serious. She sets the box down on the bed, levels a stare at him. “But I think it would do you good to have a reminder.”

“A reminder of what?” Tim demands, doesn’t bother to push down on the first stirrings of aggression in it. “That we’re keeping some sort of eldritch storage locker, or, I don’t know, monster fear detox, on the premises? I’m well aware.”

“Are you?” Daisy challenges, takes a step closer that makes him want to scramble to his feet, face off with her. “You seem to be forgetting that you need to stay human. I know you’re feeling a lot of things right now–” Tim snorts, and she pushes on through it. “But it doesn’t help if you give up and become exactly what the rest of the – what did they call them, the pall-bearers? Exactly what they wanted you to be.”

“If it could help get Martin back–”

“Get him back to _what_?” Daisy presses. “Bring him here just in time for you to stop being who you are? Might as well just leave him in the Lonely.”

“He’s got Jon,” Tim points out, and it’s not as sour or sharp as it would have been once.

“He doesn’t seem to know that,” Daisy counters. “And even that’s only if you don’t kill him yourself. And he’s not the only reason. You’ve got me, and you’ve got Jon–”

“Have I?” Tim mutters, but it’s just disagreement for the sake of it, and Daisy can silence it with a frown.

“And,” she goes on. “It makes it a lot easier for us to have fewer monsters in the world. You don’t want to be that, and Martin wouldn’t want you to be that for him.”

“Don’t tell me that you wouldn’t be thinking the exact same things,” Tim says, threaded through a contempt that he can’t direct anywhere in particular. “If it was Basira or Melanie who’d been taken?”

“I’ve _already_ thought the exact same things,” Daisy snaps. She yanks something from her pocket, so hard that the fabric nearly tears, and tosses it onto the bed. “This tape is from a long time ago, Tim – I’ve gone through this. I’ve had Basira wandering off god knows where to deal with god knows what that she wouldn’t talk to me about. Every single time she goes away, or Melanie is late back from anywhere, all I can think are those thoughts. How simple it would be to find them, end anything that had hurt them. Do you think it was easy for me, to sit around when the pall-bearers were coming for you, knowing that if I was half the monster I was I could have stopped them permanently?”

Tim listens to her talk, but can only seem to hang half his attention there, the rest all too aware of something cold and yawning in the pit of his stomach that won’t agree with any of it.

“But if I gave in to it,” she says. “Then Jon would be dead. Maybe Melanie, too. You. Perhaps Martin, because the easiest way to make sure that Peter Lukas can’t use him to end the world is to make sure that there isn’t a Martin to use. Becoming a monster isn’t a scalpel. Not the way I do it, and not the way you’d do it.” She pauses, shakes her head, presses her lips together for a long second, eyes focussed somewhere to the left of Tim’s tape recorder. “We’re going to stay human, and we’re going to do it together. If I have to make you see what I do, I will. So, why don’t you get up, and help me move all these boxes out of the way, and then you can have a listen to exactly what it was like in there.”

There’s nothing for Tim to do but get up and help her start to lift the boxes. He can feel her watching him. She always waits for him to go through the door first, escorting. Trying to tell if her words had had any effect at all. He thinks they might have. It feels like they should have. But he can’t work out if they could ever be enough.

* * *

Jon brings takeaway, that night. It’s not from any of the places where Martin had got it, and it doesn’t smell quite right, to Tim’s nose. He eats it all the same, though the blends of spices are as bland on his tongue as a cold chip sandwich. Jon stays with him, picks at his own plate in a way akin to how Martin had, clearly utterly without appetite. Every few minutes, he’ll glance over at the coffin, sitting against the far wall, but he says nothing.

“Daisy has the key,” Tim tells him, even though he can tell that Jon isn’t going to ask. She’d held the cold piece of metal like someone had just handed her her dead dog’s collar, and for a moment he’d thought she was going to give up on the whole idea. But then she’d stuffed it into her pocket, and walked out with barely another word. “I’m not in any danger. It’s just a… reminder. Not to do anything that I won’t come back from.”

Jon nods, and then goes back to staring at his plate. Doesn’t fidget at it, but clearly has no plans to take another bite either.

“What’s eating you?” Tim demands, with more force than he means it to have. He hadn’t ever asked, with Martin.

“I’m sorry.” It’s abrupt, takes a long moment to settle, stays suspended in the air like dust motes. “I’m sorry to drag you all the way back here. You were out, and you could have stayed out.”

“No,” Tim says, setting down his own fork. “No need to be. This is where I want to be. I would never have left if I’d thought…” he trails off, leaves his conditions unspoken, though he thinks both know what they are.

“I’m sorry for how I was to you,” Jon continues. He manages to look at Tim, instead of his food, and his face is painfully open. “After Prentiss.”

“Yeah.” Tim lets his eyes trace the worm scars, as many in Jon’s skin as there are in his own. “That was shit.”

“And after that,” Jon says, for once unwavering, like this is something he’d practiced. “After Martin brought you back.”

“That was also shit,” Tim says. He keeps it steady, but gives no ground – he’s not going to offer forgiveness. Not for any of it. He’d been stalked, he’d been left in the dark, he’d watched his boss turn into a monster and had cause to fear the same for everyone else he cared about. He doesn’t think he could ever find enough forgiveness for that. But his anger doesn’t focus on Jon, anymore, just like it couldn’t on Martin. There’s been too much.

“I’m sorry I brought you into the Archives in the first place.”

“No,” Tim says, and there’s still no heat in it. “No, I – I mean, I _blamed_ you, but it wasn’t like you knew what this place was going to be. And if I hadn’t been here, I never would have found out why Danny… I never would have got to stop the Circus.”

“I could go on saying how sorry I am until something kills me.” Jon offers Tim a small, sad smile. “And it wouldn’t even come close.”

“Let’s not, then,” Tim says. “Let’s just focus on getting Martin back.”

Jon sighs, glances back down into his curry.

“I’m afraid I might have made it worse,” he says. “I… I told you to stay away from him. I was worried you might hurt him, but clearly you weren’t the problem. And… and, I suppose, I’ve not really been honest about it. I… wasn’t happy, to find out that you were together.” He pushes the plate away a little, no longer even willing to try with it. “I wanted to be, but it didn’t seem to work.”

“Did that influence what you told me?” Tim asks. He expects there to be a pulse of rage in it, but there’s still nothing.

“I didn’t want it to,” Jon says, with a tight shrug. “I don’t know what I would have said differently otherwise.”

“Well,” Tim says. “It’s not like Martin told you any of it either.”

“No,” Jon admits, but he’s still got a face like a coming storm. There’s going to be more, Tim can tell, more perceived guilt he needs to push out into the world, like he’s trying to leave all his affairs in order.

“So, what didn’t you like about it?” he asks, pushing in before Jon can go on.

“What?” Jon blinks, clearly wrong-footed, head shifting gears too slow.

“Me and Martin,” Tim clarifies, and it’s much steadier than he’d thought it would be. It should be angry, defensive, but all he can muster is genuine curiosity.

“Oh.” Jon pulls his plate back far enough to shuffle his knife across it, though Tim can see no reason for it, except to give himself something to look at that isn’t Tim. “I… I’m starting to think I might have developed some feelings of my own.”

“Huh,” Tim says. He can’t even muster any surprise, though he passes the idea around his head for a long moment, waiting for it to spark some. There’s not even a twist of resentment, just another faint acknowledgement of similarity. “You know, if Martin had known, he’d probably have gone to you in a second.”

“No,” Jon says. “_No_. He… he was happy with you – the way he was _smiling_. I’m not – I can’t, so–”

“Martin’s been in love with you for a while,” Tim says. He reaches out, scoops the tape recorder up off the floorboards next to him. “If you love him back, you should just tell him. I’ve been recording stuff for him. So he knows we’re coming. I don’t know if he’ll be able to hear them, but… I think it helps, anyway.” He spares the machine a glance, and offers Jon an unfelt smirk. “Look, it’s already recording.”

Jon takes it in both hands – it feels almost like a reprimand, like Tim hadn’t been being careful enough with it. He sets it down carefully, glances at it. Opens his mouth, but can’t seem to produce anything but a faint clicking in his neck.

“I don’t think the feelings were just about…” He swallows, throat working, each word carefully chosen but almost abandoned anyway. “I don’t like the idea of you not being there. I don’t want it to be… It should be the three of us. I want– I feel…” He lets it trail off with a sigh, doesn’t look up.

Tim doesn’t respond. Not immediately. He can’t see that future. It’s not that he doesn’t want it. When he imagines it, there’s nothing there he hates. He knows how he feels, even if he can articulate or admit it about as well as Jon can. But the longer he spends looking at that coffin, the more he gets that feeling in his chest, the one that had told him that there wasn’t going to be a him anymore, after the Unknowing.

“We’ll have to see what Martin thinks,” he says, finally. “When he gets back.”

“_When_,” Jon echoes, so quietly that Tim doubts that either he or the tape were supposed to hear it. He goes on more loudly, struggles to wrench his eyes back to Tim. “Yes. Of course. All three of us.”

Tim smiles as best he can. The recorder clicks off, and he moves to change it over. The motions are almost automatic by now, a new cassette slotted in and the old one carefully labelled with Martin’s name, added to the pile. He hesitates, then holds the whole thing out towards Jon.

“Do you want it?” he asks. “To talk by yourself, I mean. If there are things you want him to know.”

Jon glances down at it for a long minute, and then shakes his head.

“I don’t know what more I can say,” he says, and the smile he musters is wintry. “You’ve always been a lot better at talking than me.” He stands, glances towards the door, as though he means to give Tim the same privacy that Tim had been trying to offer him. He places an awkward hand on his shoulder – he doesn’t lean into it, doesn’t know how long it’ll last. “We _will_ get him back,” he says, a little too firmly. “Melanie and Basira and I – we’ve got an idea. We’ve managed to track down one of the Tundra’s old crewmembers. We’re hoping to get Peter Lukas to show himself, then we’ll see if we can _make_ him give Martin back.”

It’s meant as a reassurance. Tim nods, and says nothing. Jon keeps his hand there for a long time, and then he leaves, closing the door with a gentle click behind him.

* * *

Tim’s stack of useless statements is now tall enough to be officially classed as a health hazard. It wobbles dangerously whenever he adds a new one to the top, sways and then settles, still precarious. He doesn’t think it would do much damage if it fell on him – it’s only paper, and the files would break from formation on impact. Their combined weight might be something to reckon with in theory, but if it can’t maintain its structure, he doubts there’ll be any force to it.

He adds another. Peter Lukas had barely even been in it, the Tundra just something peripheral, a hazy vision of a ship that the victim of a barnacle infestation had seen while floundering his way back to port. Anything helpful, he supposes, would be with Jon and the others, would form a part of their plan. All he has left are glimpses, flickers of the Lonely in other monsters’ meals.

They haven’t told him much, about the plan. Just that brief sentence from Jon, and nothing more. He hasn’t tried to involve himself. It’s not that he doesn’t want to help – he wants Martin back, wants to make it happen, but he expects Jon to tell him, if they come up with something he can do. In the meantime, he feels like a distraction – when Jon does come by, he watches Tim in a way that’s almost shy, seems to get caught up in the idea of the three of them again, and it twists in Tim’s stomach like he’s lying.

He pulls a new statement from the box that Daisy had brought him, and starts to flip through it. The handwriting’s different, neat, slanting letters, distinct from the loops and swirls of the previous one. His scan finds him no mention of either Peter Lukas’ name or the Tundra’s, and it seems to be about centipedes, so he sets it aside as a possible mistake.

The tape recorder, sitting on the ground beside him like a faithful dog, crunches into life. Tim startles, scrambles to his feet – it’s not the first time it’s done it, but he’s already spoken to it today, filled four tapes with quiet thoughts about Martin, Sasha, Danny, the Archives, all of it. It had seemed content with that, no longer demanding information with those passive-aggressive clicks.

Martin is standing on the other side of the room. He’s holding one of Tim’s cassettes in both hands, his eyes closed, expression almost one of serenity. Tim stares at him, not quite able to believe it, struggling to reconcile the scene with his numbed understanding of the situation. But Martin doesn’t stutter out, and slowly, Tim’s awareness of everything else fades. He pushes himself to his feet, takes one faltering step closer, and then another.

“Martin?” The word is shaky, barely sounds like his own voice.

Martin’s eyes flicker open, meet Tim’s. It’s an instant in time, but it’s one that Tim feels in every part of himself. Martin must too, because his shoulders slump, so heavily that Tim thinks he’s about to fall. He gets there before he can, grabs him into the tightest hug that he can manage, holding him in close. Martin sways into it, pressing his face down into Tim’s shoulder.

“Thank you,” he whispers, voice barely more than a stirring in the air, warm against Tim’s shirt. “Thank you.”

Tim says nothing – he isn’t sure he can. He just shifts enough to pull Martin into a kiss. Martin leans into it like he’s been drowning, a small, desperate noise at the back of his throat. Tim strokes at his face, his hair, with the one hand he can bear to not cling to him with. When they have to pull back to breathe, he keeps their foreheads resting together, studies him with something that feels like wonder.

“The tapes,” Martin manages, still hushed and tumbling. “I… I found them, and it felt like it– like I wasn’t– it was different, so I kept listening, and then…”

_Anchor_, Tim thinks, but the explanation can wait. He needs Jon there, he thinks, faintly. Martin’s back, so Jon needs to be there, and then it’ll all be right again. He should let him know, but his phone is resting on the ground next to the pile of unhelpful statements, and he has Martin in his arms. He isn’t going to let go of him again.

Martin has stopped talking now. He’s just watching Tim, eyes soft and breathing easy, and Tim can see in it that he isn’t the only one who’d come out of their relationship with more feelings than they’d agreed on. He wonders if it’d been this obvious before, if he could really have been so blind to it.

“I’m not leaving again,” he manages, and it’s far too rough, like his throat’s full of thorns.

Martin smiles, moves in for another kiss. Tim meets him, and there’s no less urgency to it – he breathes Martin in, tries to commit him to memory, his fingers mapping his cheek.

“We – _Jon_ found your tapes,” Tim murmurs, tracing his touch around to the back of Martin’s neck, light against his spine, keeping him close. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

Martin sighs against his lips.

“You know why,” he says. It’s true, Tim supposes. He had said, in the tapes. But it hadn’t sounded right. Still doesn’t, that Martin’s doubts about what any of them could feel could occupy the same universe as those feelings.

“You don’t have to feel like that anymore,” Tim says, firm and fierce. “We’re here. Me and Jon. We’ve got you.”

“I know,” Martin says, his eyes flickering down towards where he’s still holding that cassette, hand trapped between their bodies, a smile that he makes no effort to stifle pushing across his face. “I heard.”

Tim kisses him again. Can’t get past the simple fact of his presence, the weight of him. Never wants to forget how it feels.

“Isn’t this just _lovely_?”

It’s all broken in that instant – Martin flinches in his arms, takes a step back, pulling Tim with him, trying to get away from it, but there’s nowhere for them to go. The voice has echoes of that static in Tim’s head, and it’s between them and the door.

Tim whirls, tries to push Martin further away. Martin won’t be moved, holding onto him, his grip so tight that even if Tim had wanted to, he’d never be able to iron the creases out of his shirt.

Peter Lukas favours them with a smile that feels like ice water, and takes a step closer.


	28. Chapter 28

Tim moves back. He’s read enough of Peter Lukas, even just skulking through the periphery of those statements, to know that he is the kind of monster that you give ground to. He pushes Martin away behind him, keeps himself as a barrier, for all the good it’ll do. Peter keeps coming, with that same look on his face, pointedly intended smile that so clearly means nothing pleasant.

“No,” he says, with a gesture that would have seemed harmless, on anyone else. “Really, carry on – it just makes it a lot worse for Martin when I have to separate you again, and that, well, you have no idea how good that feels. I don’t know how it took you so long to touch him, he’s just–”

Tim takes one short step forwards, and cracks his fist into Peter’s face. He puts as much force into the blow as he can, and the way it knocks his head to the side, stops him mid-sentence, is worth every smarting reverberation up his arm.

“That was a good effort,” Peter says, straightening again. There’s blood on his lip, and he swipes it away with his tongue. "Did it make you feel any better?”

“A bit,” Tim says, bares his teeth in a savage approximation of Peter’s smile. A perfect end to the long line of monsters he’d never been able to fight. “I might have another go.” He punctuates the last syllable with another snapped-out strike, but this time, Peter catches his arm, and thrusts it back down, Tim’s momentum nearly sending him stumbling.

“You’re welcome to try,” he says. “But I have been at this a lot longer, so it’s not really going to end well for you.” He grins at Martin over Tim’s shoulder, doesn’t stop even when Tim moves to block his line of sight. There’s no blood anymore, not even any trace of a cut. “And it’s getting towards the time where I need to keep Martin where I want him. If you’re going to keep interfering, I should probably remove the complication.”

“No,” Martin says, and Tim barely manages to stop him from getting past, can still feel him pressing at his back. “No, you don’t–”

“Unless you’re going to change your mind,” Peter says. “Then I really don’t think you should be so upset when I have to go to a few more extreme measures. I told you what would happen, if you chose not to listen, that’s your decision. What do you think – would your Tim prefer to spend some time in the Lonely, or do you think it would be simpler if I just killed him myself? He does have a bit of the End about him, maybe I should just deal with him now, while it’ll still stick.”

A hand whips out towards Tim, grabbing at him. Tim dodges back, but he can hear the soft impact as Martin’s shoulders hit the wall behind them. Still no way past Peter – maybe, Tim thinks, if he believed he could keep him busy for more than a second, there might be a chance that Martin could get to the door, but every time he tries to run the scenario, it ends too bloody too fast.

“Yeah,” Peter says. He keeps looking at Martin, unwavering, intense enough to make Tim’s teeth itch, neck prickling. “I think I’ll do that. Break his neck, and then we’ll have an end to this, and you can come back to Forsaken with me. A bit of bereavement, always tastes nice from you. Second time with your Tim. But this time I think I’ll come a bit closer.”

Tim’s chest tightens as Peter’s smile pushes achingly wide. He wants to hit him again, wants to keep hitting him until the bones in his hands shatter against his face. Can’t. If he goes any closer, he risks ending up dead. Peter’s just trying to goad him. For all that he’s sure everything he’s promising is true, knows it as well as Jon would, he wants Tim to make a mistake. Make it easier on him.

Then there’ll be no one between him and Martin, and the first Jon will hear of it will be when he finds the damn recorder, sitting next to Tim’s corpse. Something to bury this time, at least.

All his restraint buys are fragments of time so small as to be utterly useless. Peter starts to move again, coming towards them, and there’s nothing for Tim to do but start up those calculations again. Maybe he could hold out long enough, maybe Martin would be fast enough, maybe Jon and the others aren’t too far.

Tim draws in a quick breath, and with it comes the trickling, siren understanding that he could end Peter Lukas, right there. No more statements to read through. No more vanished employees. No more fear, dogging Martin’s every thought. It would take a lot. There would be no way back. But the coffin is just across the other side of the room.

He doesn’t have the key – that’s still safe with Daisy, no danger, no risk. But if he can deal with Peter, he knows it would be the work of only a couple of seconds to rust the padlock away to nothing, whatever rot the metal will take crawling up the chains. Then, if he’s still enough himself, he’ll let the earth take him. And that’s the question – if he’ll still want to take those first steps, or if he’ll turn on Martin himself, carry him off just like the pall-bearers had said he would.

Peter’s next step brings him within range. His hands snatch up, and Tim knows there’s no other choice. Peter will kill him and take Martin, a certain end for both of them. His way, there’s a maybe, a chance.

Tim can feel that Peter’s grip is about to close on his throat. He holds his breath, and something in his face must change – Martin grabs his arm, and yanks him away from Peter’s grasp a moment before it would have caught him. He drags him towards the corner, a last effort to delay the inevitable.

“No,” he snaps, his voice loud against Tim’s ear. “No, you don’t get to do that.” He’s trying to push Tim behind him now, defend him from Peter and from himself.

Tim manages one wordless glance at him, tries to convey everything that he can with it. Then he pulls back towards Peter, and tries to reach for the part of him that would turn even this monster to dust.

* * *

The door crashes open so loudly that Martin flinches. He barely manages to keep his grip on Tim, struggling to hold him back, hold him human. It’s not difficult, to read what he’s planning, his expression as set as it had been after he’d tried to kill the pall-bearers. Martin wants to make him look at him, find the words to say to keep him Tim, but Peter is still far too close. He hasn’t bothered to turn, takes up the space in Martin’s awareness, the central burning point of a fear he’d never quite been able to shake.

Tim’s startled, though, and in that one off-balance moment, Martin drags him another inch away, as if the physical distance could ever be enough.

There’s movement. A gentle touch against Martin’s arm. Someone standing between them and Peter, someone who makes his bearing change. He shifts on his feet, smile turning from a cat with trapped prey to an arranged and expected business meeting. Martin recognises the shape a moment too late, a cold kind of despair settling through his skull.

“Archivist!” Peter says, voice a shade of that open friendliness that Martin remembers so well. “Or, do you prefer Jon?”

Jon takes a step into Peter’s space, and does not reply.

“No hard feelings,” Peter says. “I’ll let you keep the rest of your staff – I’ll even leave the rest of your Institute be. No more disappearing the library assistants. Very reasonable, I think, considering what I am, compared to what you are.”

“No,” Jon says. Past them, there’s another burst of motion as Daisy darts into the room. She pauses, taking stock of the situation, eyes flickering over them, assessing. “You’re going to get out of my Archives.”

“I don’t know what it is with you two,” Peter says, with a single breath of practiced laughter. “Thinking you’re ready for this. You and your Tim.”

“Get out of my Archives,” Jon repeats, a low edge to his voice that Martin almost doesn’t recognise. He takes another step, and Peter’s expression falters. He pales, and there’s a barely discernible widening of his eyes. When Jon presses on forwards, he moves back.

“Stop it,” he says, so quietly that Martin almost can’t hear him. “_Stop it_.”

Tim reaches for Martin, pulls him in as close as he can. Martin looks at him, and he can hardly breathe past it when he can still recognise Tim, watching him back. He hadn’t done it, hadn’t gone that far, and now it’s turning. There’s enough space now that they could make it to the door, past where Daisy’s still standing.

Instead, they just hold on, keep each other upright.

Jon keeps moving forwards, and Peter goes back, a vague impression of a dance that Martin had never wanted to see. He’d never imagined it like this, though – Peter is so far removed from his usual manner, eyes darting from side to side like he’s looking for an escape route of his own. Every time, his attention is drawn back to Jon’s face as though pulled by a magnet.

Behind him, Daisy starts moving – not smoothly, not the practiced, predatory gait she’d first walked into the Archives with, but erratic, jerky. She inhales, hard, and then scrambles down onto the ground next to the coffin and starts to yank at the chains.

“I could take them both away from you,” Peter snarls, like a fox caught in a trap. Defensive, Martin thinks. Maybe even afraid, but if he’d been asked, he could never have said he thought Peter was capable of that. “Right now.”

Jon takes another pace towards him, and Peter’s expression gives a wild, violent twitch in response. Jon sees him, perhaps. Looks, and sees everything that he is, everything that he could be. Sees until what Peter is is impossible. He cannot be so known and still alone.

“I’ll put them so deep in the Lonely that you’ll never get them out.” It’s almost desperate, gaining force as though Peter’s trying to pull himself out of it, digging his fingernails into the threat for purchase. “Do you really think you’re connected to them so strongly that you’ll be able to find them again? I can feel your loneliness too, Jon.”

Tim’s hold on Martin tightens, and there’s a part of him that wants to turn his face into his shoulder and not know any more of it. But he has to see where it goes, can’t lose track of it, can’t never be sure of how it ends.

Jon blinks, and Martin feels it in the air like fallout. Peter stops trying to talk – he’s stumbling now, almost tripping over himself in his haste to back off. One teetering step, and then another, and then he falls. Backwards, down, out of sight. Then there’s just the lid of the coffin, slamming down hard over the space where he’d been.

Daisy scrabbles the chains together again, her breathing harsh and stuttering, almost laughter. Then she sits down hard next to the coffin, clutching at the key. She doesn’t jam it into the lock yet, though, her shoulders shaking so hard that Martin’s not sure she’d be able to keep it steady. It’s enough, he thinks, for her, that it’s closed. That _she_ had closed it.

He wants it locked, sealed with tar, encased in concrete. He’s tense, for a minute, waiting for the knock against the underside of the lid, almost friendly and all false. And then Tim smiles, wide and bright, like they’re years ago, and looks at him like he wants him to return it.

Martin tries, and he means it, but it’s all so heavy, suddenly. It had been too long, in the Lonely. The empty web of the Institute’s corridors had still held him, the surety that he’d never find his way back pressing in whenever he tried to consider going out, trying to find the place where the nothing ended. The deadened sound of it had made his head hurt, or maybe that had been the tension in his jaw. Peter had always been able to find him, no matter where he’d hidden. There had been nowhere to go but the safe room, nothing to do but close his eyes and try to pretend that he was still there the way it had been. Peter had laughed, when he’d first found him there, just like he’d laughed about everywhere else Martin went, and Martin had nearly joined him.

He can feel it all, now, and the exhaustion is too much to make himself celebrate. He wants to sleep, and know that he’ll wake up with them still there.

“Martin,” Tim says. It sounds like he just wants to feel the shape of it in his mouth, the syllables too careful. He releases him, a little, keeps one arm wrapped around his shoulders like he’s never planning to let go of him completely again.

“Tim,” Martin manages, slightly flat, but Tim still looks like he’d sung it as a pitch-perfect aria. “Jon?”

Jon doesn’t move. He hasn’t since Peter had fallen, staring down towards the coffin as though he can keep it closed with the force of his gaze alone. _It’s over_, Martin wants to tell him, hopes that maybe then he’ll believe it himself.

* * *

Tim realises that it’s all about to go to shit half a second before it does. He should have seen, should have thought, but he’d been too caught up in Martin’s presence, in the idea of taking the first steps to see how the three of them would fit together, in the bright euphoria of safety.

Jon’s still standing there, keeping a sentinel’s watch over the coffin, he’d assumed. Making sure of it, until Daisy could lock it and they could all be certain that Peter Lukas would never bother any of them again.

Then Martin reaches for him, takes a step towards him, says his name, and Daisy’s face beyond them falls like the House of Wax. Tim grabs at Martin’s arm, tries to pull him back again, but he’s too late.

“Jon?” Martin tries, for the second time, the exhaustion in his voice starting to temper with worry at the edges.

The thing that snaps around towards him doesn’t even really look like Jon anymore. It has his face, but his posture’s gone. No expression that Tim wants to recognise, no flicker of anything there even when he sees Martin. The eyes are twin pits that seem to pull even the light towards them.

Martin goes down with barely a sound. Just the faintest, choking exhalation, and then the impact of his knees with the floor. Tim lunges to catch him, but his fingers just graze off Martin’s arm as he brings his hands up in a desperate attempt to cover his face, hide himself.

Jon – _the Archivist_ – keeps watching, and there’s the slightest of ripples across his features, until they form something that might once have met satisfaction, in an alley so dark that it hadn’t been able to make it out properly.

“Hey,” Tim snaps, steps forward, trying to edge in between them. The Archivist’s attention moves towards him, and then washes over him. There’s nothing, for all that Tim had braced for it. The focus and intensity in his eyes has found something else, something above, and he’s already turning towards the door, starting to walk out into the corridor at an even, unhurried pace.

Tim swears, under his breath like too much noise might bring the Archivist back. He hesitates, trying to breathe past the certainty that someone should go after Jon, the knowledge that he can’t go without knowing Martin’s all right. A glance at Daisy shows him that she’s already occupied, inching the key towards the coffin’s lock like it’s an animal about to snap at her.

Martin lets out a low groan, and slumps sideways, the rest of the way onto the floor. Tim bites at his lip, and crouches beside him, reaches out a hand. Martin flinches away, and Tim pulls back like he’d screamed.

“It’s just me,” he says, tries to keep it quiet, soothing, but it aches. “He’s gone, Martin.” Peter Lukas, Jon. Tim’s not sure which of them he means. It doesn’t matter. Martin doesn’t respond, doesn’t move, just lies where he’d fallen. The best Tim can get from him is a low whine, when he tries to gently move one of his hands away from his face. “Come on. We have to help Jon. He needs us.”

“He saw me,” Martin mumbles, barely there – it takes a minute for Tim to piece together the sentence, hushed, scratching sounds that are barely anything like Martin at all. “It hurt.”

Tim holds a blink a little too long, and moves closer, tries to tug Martin upright against him. Martin doesn’t fight him, doesn’t seem like he has the strength.

“You don’t have to worry,” he says, forces a brisk surety that he doesn’t really feel. “It’s Jon. He’s not going to–”

Martin laughs, short and sharp and despairing.

“It’s not Jon,” he says. “And it _hurt_, so–”

“It hurts because you’re _afraid_,” Tim tells him, the sentence rushing out before he can bite it out. It’s not even necessarily true, is probably cruel. He doesn’t want to be, but they don’t have the time to find another way. “Martin – how long have you been afraid for? How long have you been lying?”

Martin hesitates, and Tim can feel him counting back secrets from before they had ever even met.

“He can feed on you,” Tim says. “I know you have things you never wanted anyone to know. But Jon’s still there, somewhere.” He hopes that he’s telling the truth, that it’s not too late already, that Martin can’t hear the doubt in his voice, hopes so hard his throat hurts. “I know you don’t want _him_ to know, but better there’s still a him to know, right? If there isn’t… why would you care who else knows?” He winces, sure that he’s making no sense, but Martin still doesn’t pull away, doesn’t snap at him. “I know it’s been a lot. That place – I can’t imagine. But Jon needs us. He would want us to stop him. So we need to go and do that. _I_ am going to go and do that. And I’d like you to come with me.”

Martin’s head falls to rest against his shoulder, and his eyes flicker away towards Daisy. She’s sitting in front of the coffin, staring at it, breathing like she’s just run a marathon. Tim’s gaze is too fixed on Martin to judge what he might see in her face, but he hopes he understands what she’d done, what it had taken, opening the way to her own choking death. That they’ve all come too far to give up.

Tim wants to give him time. Wants to assure him he can take as long as he needs, but his brain’s trying to remember the exact speed that the Archivist had walked at, extrapolate that out, calculate how far he could have gone. That sense of ticking again, and he’s about to gently stand on his own when Martin finally reaches out, accepts Tim’s help in getting him back up.

“Let’s go, then,” he says, and Tim tries to convince himself that he can’t still see the fear there, stark and obvious on Martin’s features, as intrinsic a part of him as anything else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the lack of updates! I've been pretty snowed under, but I did want to get this chapter up before canon had a Peter & Jon confrontation. Will try to get the remaining chapters edited soon, but we'll see. In the meantime, folks should definitely take a look back at Chapter 25, as it now contains _even more of Mia's lovely art_!


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